It’s a strange thing that more home buyers don’t search for more than one rate quote when buying their house or searching for their mortgage.
People will spend hours shopping online for clothes or days going in and out of electronics stores searching for computers or phones, yet will usually find one offer from a mortgage broker and take it.
This is because many new home buyers don’t understand that mortgage prices can vary pretty widely. Either that or they don’t want to have the hassle of running through different lenders and comparing a bunch of numbers.
Best Reason to Shop Around for the Best Quote
MONEY.
It’s that simple. If you end up paying too much for your mortgage, you could easily end up losing tens of thousands of dollars. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage, for example, could vary by .5% on average. While it may not seem like a lot, that .5% divided into hundreds of thousands of dollars could mean big savings every month.
You could end up saving 100 bucks per month or more if your loan was above $500,000. That could be thousands of dollars in savings over the first few years if you would have ended up shopping around to start with.
Disadvantage of Comparing
Your credit score is going to see a small dent every time a lender has to check your score. If you use FICO or VantageScore, you can shop around with multiple mortgage lenders and see less of a hit with that hard inquiry. Unlike some credit score companies, they will consolidate all of these hard inquiries and treat them as one inquiry. This way, you take the same small hit whether you shop with one lender or multiple.
Those small hits will usually end up disappearing after a couple months as well, so there is no need to worry about them in the long run. Your best bet is to be tactical when you search for different mortgage rates. We recommend planning it out so that you do your searches all at once rather than spread out over the course of a few weeks so that those rates don’t end up changing.
Is There a Such Thing As “Too Many” Quotes?
Absolutely not. There are many ways to search for mortgage quotes these days. The more you search, the more confident you can feel that you are getting a great deal. The limit is on you and how easy it is for you to stay sane once you’ve searched through a hundred different websites.
When you compare, make sure that you do it quickly. Rates can change in less than a day, so you’ll want to be able to follow up swiftly when you realize you’ve found a good deal. You’ll also want to make sure there aren’t any “discount points” in the fine print of the deal that add up to other costs.
We hope that our article was helpful in pointing you in the right direction. Have you ever had to search for multiple mortgage quotes before? What was your experience like? Let us know in the comments!