For me, we have gone through pre-approval and are just had our offer accepted on a home (was accepted on Tuesday, and I'm about to do the inspections today, with a 7 day inspection contingency)...so my Loan Officer said that he is expecting the closing date to be around 7/9/2021 (he did say it will be tight, but we'll see). The preapproval was pretty easy for us...we applied on a Thursday night and got a pre-approval letter on Friday morning. The Loan Officer also called me to go over loan estimates and next steps when we are about to put in an offer on a home. Over the first 3 days or so after our application, we were getting emails to submit certain documents thru their portal as well.
As for new accounts, I had a new account from last December and applied in May. I'm sure it negatively impacted my score, but it was hard to gauge since I used the small loan to pay off all credit cards. So it was a net positive for me, and I had a good enough score.
