Anyone who has purchased a house knows that the closing process can be quite long and it can become rather frustrating. Whenever I need to sell a house in Miami Beach I think ahead when I’m looking for a buyer in order to avoid as much frustration as possible. Buyers who don’t qualify for a mortgage loan can hold up the sale of my house and cause me to have to put it back on the market again. I don’t want that to happen, so I take some precautions with my buyers up front.
Since the mortgage qualification process is much more tedious and time-consuming than in the past, due to changes in the economy and new federal and state lending requirements, I’m even more determined to find the best buyer up front. Some buyers show me letters of pre-qualification, but that simply means they have provided basic information to a lender. In fact, buyers can even get pre-qualified online. But I’m looking for something more substantial than pre-qualification, and I prefer to see a recent letter of pre-approval because it makes me feel more secure about the buyers. To accept an offer when I sell a house in Miami Beach I want to be sure that a lender has actually checked out their information and has given these buyers a tentative letter of approval. We all know that communication with a lender is always tentative, so that leads me to the actual subject of this article – a firm commitment.
In actuality, nobody involved in any real estate transaction ever knows if there’s a firm commitment from the mortgage lender until a written commitment is received by the buyer. A firm commitment arrives in the form of a specific, dated letter from the lender to the buyer agreeing to loan a certain dollar amount at a specific interest rate on or before a certain calendar date. Until that letter arrives by mail or fax, nobody really knows if a transaction is going to close. And that fact is the worst part of waiting for closing day, the fact that nobody knows if the sale will close or not until a commitment letter is received by the buyer.
I really don’t understand why, but buyers often do not receive a firm commitment letter until the day of closing, strange as that may sound to you. So, that’s why I take precautions and set up my own requirements as the seller when I want to sell a house in Miami Beach. I want as much confidence as possible that my buyers will get a firm commitment and be able to close the sale.