What a great feeling of exhilaration one has when initially finding out that you are under contract. Be it your first home, a family getaway condo or your retirement property. It is a feeling of accomplishment and achievement. The process of working toward a successful closing is underway. The appraisal has been ordered from your lending institution and the home inspector has been scheduled. Your Steamboat Springs Exclusive Buyer’s Agent has prepared a detailed list of check list items like change utilities over to your name and secure property insurance. You’re comfortable in the fact that your Exclusive Buyers Agent will help guide you through the four to six week process. In fact you’re so comfortable that you decide to reward yourself and open up a new charge account and refurbish your wardrobe. Oops!

  

Our best advice is that during this process you develop a new relationship, a very close relationship, with your loan officer or mortgage broker. The entire lending climate has changed in the past year and is still in a mode of flux. Every week seems to bring new changes, stipulations and horror stories to the Real Estate world. Although your Exclusive Buyers Agent can use their knowledge and expertise to council you through a myriad of issues they are neither attorneys nor bankers. No matter how hard they try there is no possible way that they can keep up with all the changes occurring in the lending industry. Quite frankly even people who work full time in that industry are barely keeping their head above the knowledge waters.

  While you are under contract the lending underwriters have you under great scrutiny. They are looking for anything even slightly out of the ordinary, constantly monitoring credit scores and recent transactions. Are you transferring monies from business accounts to personal accounts? Opening or even closing credit card accounts? Purchasing new vehicles or changing jobs? All are red flags that may impede and/or cancel the lending process that you have undertaken. Any significant financial transaction (and even some that you believe to be trivial) should be reviewed and approved by your loan officer or mortgage broker.   We understand that this process seems to be tremendously invasive but for the four to six weeks that it will take to muddle through this process just be on your best behavior and tred lightly on those pins and needles of money management.