@Anonymous wrote:
Thanks for your response. We have tile in most areas except the main front entrance, the kitchen, and casual dining area...those areas are hardwood. The entry way to the garage and the bathrooms have linoleum or ceramic tile with the rest being carpet. In Colorado, so only rare minor earthquakes.
I would go to the builder's website...usually they have the ready for move-in homes listed there. Usually, they will build 4-5 inventory homes. They are still building homes down the street from us but people started moving in last summer. You can always inquire what inventory they may have but they may not disclose that to you as they like to list them when they are almost ready or ready, for customers to be able to snag within a short timeframe.
As another poster mentioned, I would start the process with NACA as you may have to get fully approved for them to start building. If you are considering doing financing through the builder's lender for incentives, ask them if they do NACA loans. I went through our housing authority for a special loan program and only certain lenders/brokers did those loans. Luckily Lennar's financing included that option so I was able to switch from my Broker to Lennar for the incentives.
As far as how good your loan is for, 90-120 days is typical. My preapproval was good for 120 days. And yes, you are correct that if you build from the ground up, 45 days out, they will send you back through underwriting. And, if your preapproval/approval expired, you will have to go through that part again. They will definitely run your credit again 45-30 days out and quite possibly a third time 3-4 days before closing, so I recommend Score Watch so you can track and manage your score. Try to keep utilization low every month and new debts to a minimum. It can be quite nerve racking going through the UW process for new construction loans as every time they pull your credit , there is the possibility of an issue.
Building a home from the ground up is the true American Dream. We didn't ever think we would ever be able to buy a brand new home. We didn't get to go through the building process due to time sensitive circumstances but we are extremely happy with our new home. It felt like it was meant just for us because all the colors and floorplan was absolutely perfect.
When does your lease expire? That piece of it will have to be managed carefully to prevent breaking a lease, etc.
Best of luck to you! :-)
I lived in Parker, Colorado for 4 years and never once had the tile issue like we do here. I believe you are safe being there! It's crazy and I know it probably seems weird to others but when you buy a 2 year old home and within one year of living there you have noticeable cracks going through 60% of your floor tiles it's pretty upsetting. Unless of course you like that look...lol. Some even cracked so bad that they would become sharp and would actually cut you if you walked on them the wrong way. Being that it happened twice, in two different homes, I believe these homes go up really fast and they don't necessarily install things like they used to do. It's totally a preventable situation and depends on how they install the tiles and whether or not they move or crack when the house settles. To take out and reinstall tile floors is pretty costly from our experience and I think I would like to prevent it at least one time in a home purchase..lol.Hardwood here I come! Even the tiles in our rental have the cracks going through them and these homes were built in 2009. Crazy! I wish we had the Colorado homes here in Cali, they are so huge and the walkout basements are amazing! I do miss that for sure! But the snow is not for the weak and it was too cold for my butt! I love Colorado though and miss the beauty of it. It is a piece of paradise there for sure! Wow, that is a lot of rambling, sorry!
I will definitely look into the communities that have spec homes available to see how that works. We have always been the second owner of our homes and would like this time to pick everything and have the newness factor. We go to our first workshop with NACA on March 2nd and I thought just in case anyone is still looking into these loans, I will post my journey in the NACA thread to help someone if I can. We did a one year lease and it will be up in May, but after that it turns into a month to month, so we are safe there. Unless of course the owner decided to ask us to leave then the pressure would be on! Being that it's 2013, we may not be able to receive as many builder incentives and such because they say it's a buyer's market but it feels the opposite. Homes are moving like hotcakes and I don't want to do any bidding wars. Did that on our last purchase and we ended up with the house at a screaming deal but endured a lot of drama in doing so. Want a more chill experience this time..lol.
If NACA didn't have the buy down to 0% for the mortgage I would go straight conventional. But with the economy the way it is, I think waiting out the NACA process seems worthwhile in the grand scheme of things to achieve essentially an interest free loan. Hopefully the odds are in our favor! Thanks for the help, and a spec home is definitely a great option!
