Partners
A pre-approval your listing agent can actually rely on
Most letters in this market mean very little. Here is exactly what mine means, what is behind it, and how quickly it can be reissued when the price changes.
Four standards
What is behind every letter
Underwritten, not calculated
No pre-approval letter leaves this office until an underwriter has reviewed income and asset documents. A letter based on a filled-in form is a guess with letterhead on it.
Written to the property
Letters are issued at the offer amount, not at the borrower's ceiling, so your buyer's maximum is never disclosed to the other side by accident.
The lender is named
Your listing agent can see which wholesale desk is underwriting, and what the automated finding said. That is not standard and it should be.
Reachable at the weekend
Offers get written on Saturdays. A pre-approval letter that cannot be reissued until Monday costs your client the house.
Richmond listingsTurn times
The numbers you actually care about
Sample figures from my own pipeline over the last twelve months.
- Pre-approval from a cold start
- 5 to 7 days
- Letter reissued at a new price
- Same day, including weekends
- Appraisal ordered after ratification
- Day 1
- Median contract to clear-to-close
- 22 days (sample)
- Closing disclosure delivered
- At least 3 business days before signing
- Status updates to the agent
- Tuesday and Friday, copied to both sides
VA offers
The one-page explainer that goes out with every VA pre-approval
The myth
- VA appraisals take much longer than conventional ones
- VA appraisers fail houses over cosmetic issues
- The seller ends up paying fees they did not agree to
- VA buyers have no money and the deal is fragile
What is actually true
- Timelines run close to conventional in the Richmond market
- Minimum property requirements concern safety and soundness, not finish
- The non-allowable list is short and known before the offer is written
- Zero down is an entitlement earned through service, not a sign of weakness
On every VA file the comparable sales package is built at the moment the appraisal is ordered, so that if Tidewater is invoked the two-business-day window is enough.How VA files are run here.
Working together
What I ask of you, and what you get
What I ask
- Send the buyer before they have fallen in love with a house
- Tell me the offer amount before I write the letter
- Give me the contract the day it ratifies, not the week after
- Say so if the timeline is tighter than the contract implies
What you get
- Underwritten letters, reissued the same day including weekends
- Tuesday and Friday status notes, copied to both agents
- A direct mobile number, not a queue
- An honest call the moment a file is in trouble, not on day 25
No referral fees are paid or accepted in either direction. That is a RESPA rule, not a policy, and anyone offering one is telling you something about how they operate.
Send me a buyer and watch the process
One file is enough to see whether the letters, the updates and the turn times are what this page claims.
Three wholesale quotes on the same day's pricing, before you choose.