Deals are to valuable to leave to chance.  At the very least insist on a Pre-Approval, but get a Commitment if you can. More and more of the Realtors that I work with are telling me that they are questioning the Pre-Qualification Letters that they are seeing. If it is one of their Buyers they tell me that if they do not recognize the name of the Mortgage Company that they are requesting that they talk to a Loan Officer they trust.  If they are representing the Seller and they don't recognize the name, they warn their client about accepting the offer. All of them tell me that they absolutely do not trust the Pre-Quals from the .com's.

I can totally understand their feeling on this. First of all there are a lot of Pre-Qual Letters that were given just based on looking at credit and ratios.  This method leaves the door wide open for failed deals. I do not give Pre-Qual Letters, at the very least I give Pre-Approval Letters.

You might ask what is the difference, the difference is huge. My Pre-Approval Letter not only encompasses looking at credit, income, and ratios, it involves me doing a FULL application and running it through Automated Underwriting. Now the only thing left is to verify the information that I have been given.

However, I like to take it one step further, and that is to collect the information up front and take it through my Underwriter.  This way I don't just have a Pre-Approval, I have a FULL loan commitment. Now they just need a property.