4 Tips on How to Get a Home Loan

Maybe you're tired of paying your landlord's mortgage and anxious about how to get a home loan.

There are four key areas to focus on to get pre approved for a home loan. Your best strategy is to start several months ahead of when you'd like to buy a home. Getting pre approved is great, but being highly qualified means better loan terms and interest rates. This can have a dramatic effect on your finances over time.

How to Get a Home Loan

Mortgage lenders are going to look at a lot of things, including your debt-to-income ratio. I can tell you, as a Realtor working with clients and facilitating mortgage approvals there's a whole lot more to it.

You can have the down payment, long time at your job and maybe you don't carry a lot of debt. That doesn't mean you can get approved for a home loan. Even if you do, it doesn't mean you'll get the best terms either.

How to Get Pre Approved for a Mortgage

If you're serious about looking into how to get pre approved for a home loan, check out this page on getting a home loan:

4 Great Tips for Getting Pre Approved for Mortgage

I would advise you to do some research on what type of home loans will best suit your purpose too.

There are many different home loan types. Some save you money upfront, others save you more money over the mortgage term. Some are a balance of savings now and later. By the way, if you choose a great real estate agent, they can possibly get your closing costs covered.

One of the four tips for getting a home loan I will share with you is for after pre approval. Please do not go hog wild because you got an accepted offer on a home. Underwriters pay close attention to your credit report not just for pre approval purposes, but right up to the day of closing.

Don't open a store credit card like Home Depot just to get a 10% discount on a new washer and dryer. New credit accounts will lower your score. I've seen a 10 point dip cost home buyers their home loan going through and being issues. Don't scratch that spending itch until after closing.

Stumble Upon Cincinnati Suburbs Hot Real Estate

Boy did I get up early this morning, a lot of showings to schedule for our Cincinnati house-hunter clients. Just have a lot of other work to get out of the way before making those calls. I'm not even sure where some of these new Cincinnati home buyers found us, but one did mention StumbleUpon.

A long time ago, and at another brokerage, I did place a back-link on StumbleUpon to our real estate website's home page. That's how this particular client found us. Lucky me, I had put some tags in there, they helped the buyer find our Southern, Ohio real estate site.

I had forgotten all about this venue and its potential for posting about real estate in Cincinnati and its suburbs. Not everyone Googles, a lot of house hunters have their favorite forums for finding the right home. Facebook for example. Truth be told, even though I manage our business Facebook page and advertise our client’s homes for sale or market our Cincinnati community pages, I’m not all that social on my personal page. I do answer questions about housing, talk with buyers and sellers, and people wanting to find a good lease in the area.

I took a little break from Facebook and uploaded all the Cincinnati suburbs we have pages for on our site with direct links to their properties and listing information. Added some other pages too, like our mortgage calculator, rent vs buy a home, best home loans and first-time buyer. StumbleUpon is a lot easier than I remember.

So, I did a bunch of posting and then checked the listings and discovered StumbleUpon lets home buyers browse real estate on our website within StumbleUpon without having to leave it. Pretty nifty I think:

Stumble Upon Cincinnati Housing

I like the fact you can go to town with real estate and community tags here too. I also started using StumbleUpon as a place for curating real estate, housing and mortgage market news for future real estate blog posts.

There’s a lot of great places online for curating content, a lot of new forums you can find real estate information and housing market news. If you’re an agent, you may want to go back and visit some of your “golden-oldies”.

I’m not sure that StumbleUpon can be classified as “social media”, though you can work the “likes” and build an audience. But for real estate agents, whether you choose to get social or not, it’s a great place for your community, housing and real estate blog content.

What are some of your favorite places to find real estate content and develop ideas? It’s so easy to get in housing post rut on sites we typically use. I’m just glad a home buyer stumbled upon our Cincinnati housing site and brought the venue back to my attention.