House looking Question

My husband and I are living in an apartment and our lease is up in May. When our lease is up we want to buy a house. Since we are first time buyers, I was wondering when should we go to the bank and get preapproved for a morgage? I;m just not sure of the timeline on this whole house buying thing. Thanks

Re: House looking Question

depends on how soon you want to start look to buy a house. you can get preapproved pretty quickly (within a day), but it has a validity of usually a month. then you just to get the validity extended. it tooks us 2 months to close on our house, but it can take longer. so if you need to be out by May, maybe start looking in Dec/Jan.

Re: House looking Question

The pre-approval is only good for either 30 or 60 days. However, it's no big deal to get another one if one expires.

It took us over a year of looking to find our house. Once we found it we closed super-quick (within 5 weeks) but I don't think it's ever too early to start looking because you really don't know how long it will take to find something or to close.