@Anonymous wrote:I agree- as we are looking at houses, and then we talk with the banks... to get pre-approved, you have to get a hard pull.
I just want a soft pull pre-approval so that I can shop at will- not under a time crunch so to speak.
I know of no such animal in the mortgage world. If you're going to shop, shop 
@Anonymous wrote:I appreciate all the input. I think the order of operations of things were a little skewed in my mind. However, I still think the whole process is unclear and convoluted a bit.
I jumped the gun and had my credit pulled by Zillow because I thought that was the first stage in getting preapproved. Following that, I thought I *should* get a preapproval letter for my initial offer on this house. Now it turns out the seller's agent says "Oh no, a prequal letter is perfectly fine for us." And top of it, the sellers countered with an offer that seems to indicate we aren't going to get the house...
So now it seems I've jumped the gun and gotten my credit pulled for a single house I won't get.
A pre-qual is just stated everything other than the pulling of credit. It can work, pre-qual letter plus asset statements and the credit score report the lender will give you can work; however, pre-approval happens after document submission and vetting.
In California at least you can go under contract with a pre-qual and then you have 3 days by the standard form to come up with a pre-approval; however, majority of people simply get the pre-approval out of the way (often takes well less than a day to turn around if you have your standard documents ready and waiting for the LO) as it makes for a stronger offer.
If you had your credit pulled by one of the lenders on Zillow, you're fine as the credit pull has to happen even before a pre-qual; lender should be contacting you, give your documents at that point, get pre-approval, go shopping... or if you need something turned around faster they can likely give you a pre-qual to throw in an offer.
What'd the sellers counter with? Pre-approval or pre-qualification is good for a period of time, it's a license to continue shopping which is expected in a competitive market place.
Depends on lender, but basically when you decide to pick a lender and ask them to proceed past the pre-approval state, if they have a fee it gets done there.
Some cases I've heard they do a fee for pre-approval, personally I'd walk on that one.
