We wanted to give you a quick overview of what to expect during the first week of your purchase if you’re using a mortgage loan.

Basically, there are three things that you’re going to want to focus on this week, and first is to meet with your lender as soon as possible. They’re actually legally required to disclose to you the terms of your loan, what your interest rate is going to be, what your monthly payment is going to be, and what the amount of money is you’re going to need at the end of the transaction for what we call your cash to close figure – any down payment and remaining closing costs.

When you meet with them, they’ll also order the appraisal, and that’s what’s going to basically confirm that the property we’re buying is worth what we’re offering. If it’s not, we’ll have to go back and potentially renegotiate or even cancel the purchase. It happens rarely, but lenders just get the appraisal done to make sure that it is in the appropriate value range.

The second thing you’re going to do is deposit your earnest money initial deposit with the title company. That can be in the form of a personal check or a cashier’s check, or if it’s more convenient, you can wire it to the title company. That needs to happen within three business days of acceptance. If it’s a help to you, we can arrange for a courier to pick it up, especially at your workplace, and take it to the title company – or if you do it soon enough, you can just put it in the mail.

The deposit is going to get cashed by the title company. They’ll hold it, and it’ll be credited towards your down payment amount if you complete the purchase. If you don’t, that will be refunded to you if you cancel.

The third thing we’re going to do is we’re going to order inspections, just to make sure that the property is in the kind of condition we want it to be, and we just learn there are, if any, issues or problems that we need to request repairs from the seller, or maybe we’re going to ask for just money instead of repairs. So once we get these three things moving forward, we’ll see the fruits of those in Week 2 and move forward in our closing process.

We’ll go into a little bit more detail in individual videos about your despot, your lender process, and the inspections, but this is a good first overview. If you have any other questions, feel free to call, text, or email us. We’ll be happy to answer them.