Home Inspection Today
Tip It!This morning around 9AM the people that are buying our house will be having it inspected. It’s a pretty new house (just under four years), and we’ve kept it in great shape, so hopefully all will go well. Once we’ve made it past the inspection we can breathe a sigh of relief, as the only remaining contingency will be final loan approval for the buyers, and their finances are solid — they’re putting down 20%, they’re pre-approved, and they’ve already locked in a pretty good rate. While the deal could still fall through for some bizarre reason, the inspection is really the last major unknown on the way to the closing table.
Update: Our home inspection is complete, and the news is good.
For more information on moving, check out my Roadmap for a Successful Relocation.
Published on April 21st, 2006 - 3 Comments
Filed under: Moving
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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April 21st, 2006 at 7:41 am
This article over at Searchlight Crusade discusses mortgage pre-qualification. He views it essentially as just another of the hoops that have to be jumped through in the home-buying process. Being pre-qualified doesn’t mean as much as it sound like. However, not getting pre-qualified does say at lot. One quote I particularly liked was: “It takes several hours to do an accurate “pre-qualification” correctly, but a Wildly Assumptive Guess takes just a few minutes. You may imagine which is done more often.”
April 21st, 2006 at 9:48 am
There’s a difference between pre-qualification and pre-approval (although in practice there probably isn’t in a lot of cases). Pre-qualification typically falls into the ‘wildly assumptive guess’ category, whereas a preapproval is (supposed to be) more thorough — it involves pulling credit reports, verifying the availability of downpayment funds, verifying employment history, etc. In the case of our buyer, they went through a reputable local lender and they have a 20% downpayment. I also know what he does and where he works, so I am confident that they can afford our house (assuming that the lender did actually check their credit prior to issuing the pre-approval letter and locking their rate).
April 21st, 2006 at 1:21 pm
I’m glad to hear it. The fact that your buyer actually does have the 20% downpayment means that qualifying for a loan is going to be easier. It still amazes me the number of people who don’t have any idea what it is costing them to not put down a downpayment. As long as the bubble is inflating quickly enough, the greater leverage offsets the costs. Even if the doomsayers are wrong and there is no real estate bubble, all it takes is a period of very little appreciation for the additional costs of a more expensive loan to swamp any profits.