Working with a Lender

 Warning- This is a long post. ;-) 

As you can imagine one of the most important aspects of buying or building a house is finding and working with a lender. 

We picked a lender and began our process in June of 2020. Something very important to remember is to ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. Our experience was that we assumed they would tell us what we needed to do and they assumed we would know what we needed to do. WRONG! 

Communication is key, do not be afraid to ask questions. We suggest you tell them you want to be pre-qualified. We did that but were told oh, that won't be a problem. We didn't have a problem qualifying but it came later in the process and had we done it up front everything would have been much quicker. 

When we heard lumber prices were going to go up due to COVID we pushed to get this process moving, we picked a house and chose a builder but more on that later. 

An appraiser was sent out in October, remember we began discussions in June, to look at the location. So we were five months in and we were just getting appraisals to determine how much they would loan us. We waited and waited and finally in December we found out how much they would loan us. 

The lender will only loan 80% of what the appraisal comes in at and we were coming up short of what we wanted to borrow. This meant we needed collateral. Option was to use our current house and land. The house is a doublewide and therefore at one time had a title. For those who are not aware doublewides are titled just like cars. They will remain under title until you tell surrender the title to the DMV.

We contacted the DMV via phone as things were still shut down and it was the holiday season in December 2020.  They advised there was still a mortgage company listed on the title and we had to provide proof it was paid off. 

The doublewide had been paid off for 20 plus years and I found paperwork from the lender stamped as paid in full with the date and even a letter on a company letterhead showing we paid in full. Now it's really getting fun...NOT. 

We provided what we had via email to the DMV and after many phone calls, emails and several weeks of waiting they advised we did not have enough proof to show it was paid off. The mortgage company was no longer in business..............great, just great. 

We had to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission of VA advising them of the company name and asking them to provide information that there was no company by that name doing business in VA. I had to write an affidavit and have it notarized to provide to the DMV.  We also had to send an envelope to the former address of the company to get return mail that they were no longer at that address. More time has passed and now we finally have what we need but wait there's more.......

Serena bought the house with her first husband and he was still listed on the title. We needed him to sign some papers to get the title in her name only so we could then surrender it. Thankfully he was kind enough to take care of that for us and finally we had everything we needed. 

Finally, we have a loan, we signed paperwork for the construction loan on February 4th 2021. 

As you can see this was a very long and drawn out process for us. There were actually times we started to wonder if it was worth it but we continued on and now we're moving even closer to this house being a reality. 

Next up the house we chose.