Austell, GA · Member since 2016 · 113 posts · 9 votes
Hi everyone!
Quick question--
I will be purchasing my first home and recently decided shortly before joining BP that I would purchase a multifamily home instead of a single family home in Ga for all the mang benefits of --house hacking as a single person, secondary income, tax write off and benefits, and start of building a real estate portfolio.
However, after reaching out to a realtor in GA about what I wanted to do, she told me that I would have to get qualified first. While I understand that getting qualified would help me know the total amount would be lent to me for funding , but the pre approval is only good for 90 days and if i haven't decided what area I wanted to live in.. Would it be a good idea to get pre approved? If I don't decide in 90 days, I would have to get 'qualified' all over again thus driving down my score each time I get qualified.
I appreciate your advice!
Ashley
According to creditsesame.com: "Mortgage related inquiries, which are very easy to identify because of #1 above, are ignored for the first 30 days they’re on your credit reports. So, if you apply for a mortgage loan on Jan 15th it’ll take until Feb 15th for that inquiry to become “visible” to the FICO score. That means you can apply for mortgage loans with 100 different lenders over a 30-day period and all 100 of those inquiries will be ignored. That means they’ll have absolutely no impact on your FICO scores.
When the mortgage inquiries age past 30 days they become fair game and will be seen by the FICO scoring system. The story doesn’t end here, though. Any of those inquiries that occur within the same 45-day period will be treated as 1 inquiry for scoring purposes. In my absurd example above, the 100 inquiries will be considered as only one. This is because they all would have occurred within 45 days of each other."
And to address the concern around getting a preapproval letter and the work needed for it, the requirements are generally lenient. They usually just get a stub, any other related income records and do a Debt-to-Income ratio analysis to provide you the letter. I'm able to get a pre-approval with my loan officer in usually a day or 2, but that may also be thanks to a long-term relationship. In fact, if you need a solid loan officer for a mortgage, his name is Mark Ross of Brand Mortgage. A Google search will show his name & contact info.