Two major items home buyers need to think about before contacting a realtor.

Many people find it useful to have a checklist and on any good checklist these 2 items should be the first items on that list as they are essential to getting the ball rolling on your dream of home ownership.

The 2 major items a potential home shopper needs to begin to think about before contacting a realtor is to:

1. Determine how your credit looks.

Luckily in this computer age there are many ways for us to easily and quickly check our credit and credit scores. There are multiple sites out there to check your credit for free.

If you go to www.annualcreditreport.com, you can get a free, Federally authorized credit report.  This will not contain your credit scores, but does allow you to verify what accounts are on your credit (so you can make sure there are no fraudulent accounts) and if your payment history has been reported correctly.  If you see any errors, you can reach out to the credit bureaus, Transunion, Equifax, and Experian, to get the errors corrected.

There are places where you can check your estimated credit scores as well (may credit cards will provide this with your monthly statement), but keep in mind that this may vary from your mortgage credit score as they are scored differently.  If you have a credit score below 680 you may want to dive deeper into your report to see if there are opportunities to increase that score. Ways to do that would be to dispute errors if there are any with the credit bureaus, make sure you are current with all monthly payments, and reduce debt where possible.

2. Get a pre-approval from a mortgage professional.

Once you know about your credit you should contact a mortgage professional (that’s us!) and work on a pre-approval. We do our best to take care of you as if buying our own home. Happy shopping!!!

If you have any questions about either of these items, please reach out to us today. We are happy to answer any questions.