I'm not sure there's one "set path."
I think each lender is a bit different. In my recent experience, we were pre-approved but had a difficult time, initially, getting through AU, mostly because the lender didn't listen to me when I first reached out to them to explain our situation, and just pre-approved it without really paying attention.
So with the pre-approval, we made an offer which was accepted immediately, and then the insane effort to get through the process began. At some point we went through AU, and had to make some adjustments, then went through it again.
Anyway, each lender I would guess, handles it differently.
