The Importance of Getting Pre-Approved

I want to tell you about a deal we lost, because it's the clearest example I have of why this matters more than people think.

The deal that got away

I had a client who wanted to make an offer on a fourplex. It had been sitting on the market for six months — no urgency, no competition, or so it seemed. My buyer took his time negotiating, working the seller down further and further, and we actually got him into the low $400s, bordering on a $300-something number, on what was genuinely an amazing deal for that property.

I'd advised getting pre-approved at the very start of this process, like I always do. But we let it slide — pushed it to the back burner while we focused on negotiating the price down, figuring we had plenty of time since the property had been sitting for months already.

Then, right at the very end, another offer came in. The seller suddenly needed to move fast and make a decision. I scrambled to get financing squared away as quickly as possible — but because we hadn't gotten ahead of it early, and because our lender wasn't able to respond and move fast enough at that critical moment, we lost the deal.

Everybody lost something that day. My buyer lost a genuinely great deal on a property he'd worked hard to negotiate down. I lost a significant commission. And even the lender lost out — he'd already done real front-end work on this file and had nothing to show for it in the end. Nobody won because we weren't ready when it mattered.

What I tell every client now

It's always worth having a real conversation with a lender at the very beginning of your search — even if that just means submitting an application without actually pulling credit yet. Getting your information on file with a lender early means they have everything they need to move fast and pull credit the moment it's actually necessary, instead of starting that process cold when a deal suddenly turns urgent.

A property sitting on the market for months can feel like there's no rush. But that can change in a single day, with no warning, the moment a competing offer shows up. The worst outcome isn't losing a negotiation — it's losing a deal you'd already won on price, simply because you weren't prepared to move when it mattered.

If you're even thinking about buying in the next several months, let's have that conversation with a lender now — not when you're already trying to beat someone else to the closing table. Reach out and I'll help make sure you're actually ready when the right deal shows up.