When you purchase a home and apply for a mortgage, it’s easy to become frustrated. This process can be time consuming and requires a seemingly endless list of tasks.
One of things you’ll have to go through is mortgage underwriting. But what exactly is this?
Mortgage underwriting is the process that determines your eligibility for obtaining a home loan (aka mortgage). This is often the final factor that decides whether or not your home loan is approved. This process consists of a bank assessing your delinquency risk. Delinquency risk assesses how likely you are to make your home loan payments in full and on time.
It’s an important step in the process but one that is out of your hands once you hand over all the documents the mortgage lender needs. If you are about to go through underwriting, or are currently going through it, you may be wondering how long does mortgage underwriting take? Let’s find out!
How Long Does Mortgage Underwriting Take?
Once the underwriting process starts, how long will it take? It is hard to estimate exactly how long your mortgage underwriting might take.
To give you an idea though, understand that the length of the underwriting process differs depending on many factors. Your mortgage underwriting may take only a couple of days or it can take several weeks.
The full mortgage loan usually takes between 30 and 45 days from underwriting to closing. However, most of the time, the entire closing process takes 45 days.
Which Documents Are Required?
For the underwriting process, you have to provide a lot of financial documents.
These documents include but may not be limited to the following:
- Pay stubs
- Bank statements
- W-9s
- Tax returns
- For self-employed people a profit/loss statement is required
Factors that Affect the Length of Mortgage Underwriting
There are certain factors that affect the length of your mortgage underwriting. These factors may be the following:
- Internal staffing policies
- How many home loans a lender is currently processing
- Your loan profile. Usually if there is something wrong with your credit record, or if it is just bad, it takes a longer time to process.
However, in some cases, initial underwriting may only take 3 days. But there are ways in which you can speed up the process of the underwriting process.
Ways to Speed Up the Underwriting Process
First, we suggest that you respond to your lender as soon as possible if he/she has any requests about the information and documents you provided.
Next, inform your lender of the contents of the document that was sent. If your lender allows you to, check in on your status online. This allows you to know if any documents are missing and, if so, which ones.
Despite its difficulty to estimate, hopefully this article has provided some tips and insight on how long a mortgage underwriting takes.