What happens after you apply

• Pre-approval

  Your income, assets and credit are reviewed and you get a letter saying what you can realistically offer on. This is the part you do before house hunting, not after.

• You find a house and make an offer

  Your agent handles this. My job here is to be reachable when the listing agent asks who your lender is.

• Under contract

  The offer is accepted and the clock starts. This is when the real file begins.

• Processing

  Everything gets ordered and assembled — appraisal, title work, verifications. Mostly waiting on other people.

• Underwriting

  A person reads the whole file and decides what else they need. Usually they ask for something. That is normal and not a bad sign.

• Clear to close

  Underwriting is satisfied. The closing gets scheduled.

• Closing

  You sign, the funds move, and the house is yours.

A file does not move at my speed. It moves at the speed of whoever is slowest in it, and most of those people do not work for me.

• The appraisal. It has to be scheduled, carried out and written up, and in a busy market the wait for an appraiser is the wait for the loan.
• Title work. Anything unexpected on the title — an old lien, a boundary question, a name that does not match — has to be resolved before anyone can close.
• Documents that come back. Underwriting asks for something, it takes a few days to arrive, then it gets read. Every round trip is time.
• Whoever you are buying from. Their side has its own timeline and its own problems.

This is why I will not quote you a number of days. Anybody who does is guessing about people they do not control. What I will do is tell you where your file actually is whenever you want to know.

Once you are in a loan, your file is a snapshot of your finances. Changing the picture means it gets taken again.

• Opening anything new on credit

  A car, a store card, furniture for the house you have not closed on yet. It changes what underwriting already reviewed, and it gets checked again before closing.

• Moving money between accounts

  Not because anyone thinks you are hiding something, but because every dollar in the file has to be traceable. A transfer nobody was told about becomes a week of explaining.

• Changing jobs

  Even a better job. Income has to be verified again, and a new role with no history behind it is harder to verify than the one you had.

None of these are forbidden. They just need a conversation first. Every one of them is workable if I know before it happens, and every one of them is a problem if I find out afterwards.

• You hear from me when something changes, rather than having to ask whether it has.
• If something goes wrong, you hear that too, in the same words I would use with your agent. A problem you know about is smaller than one you find out about late.
• In English or Spanish, whichever you prefer, for the whole of it — not just at the start.

Montel Mortgages LLC is one person. That is the drawback and the point: there is nobody to be handed to, and nobody who has not read your file.