Maybe the least fun phase of building a new home has to be the waiting phase. Right now we have all our paper work into the city (Maplewood) for our permits and to the bank for our loan, waiting for it all to be finalized. If you’re thinking of building a home in the near future prepare yourself for this rather slow detailed process to take longer than you may think. No matter how good your credit or how detailed your building plan, inevitably there is some thing that is going to come up that will require some additional attention. Then toss in a non-traditional home and a market that has been through some strange twists and turn and you have the perfect combination for a nice long wait.

Recently I’ve heard several friends of mine who have done new loans say that the process seems to be taking longer than normal. A couple of them commented that they felt some of this was as a result of the attention drawn to lending practices resulting from the sub-prime lending debacle and the banks seeming to dig deeper than ever before be giving the loan the green light. I thought this was interesting so I asked CPA and President of Minnesota Financial Solutions (Chris Andryski), who works in various areas of the financing and mortgage market if this was the case.

“The lenders are taking a little longer and requiring much more confirmation regarding a borrower.”

— Chris Andryski
CPA and president of Minnesota Financial Solutions, LLC,

With that said our Credit Union has been extremely responsive and our agent has worked extra hard (including coming in over her vacation to send us paperwork we needed) to keep our loan moving along, so we can get our project underway.

On top of the issues that the market introduces, the type of home we are building adds some complication to the process. Today the appraiser called with some questions about the project and was quite honest — she was having a very hard time trying to find a similar property to do her market comparison against. The flat roof, green building elements and style of home were not something very common, let alone to find something of similar style and size that has been constructed in the last six months in the area. We’ve received no red-flags from the city as of yet but our last minute finalization to use SIPs and the city’s need to have the specifics of the fireplaces resolved have put a little extra time into the permitting of our project.

Our hope is now that we’ll have both the loan paperwork, and the permits in hand near the end of this week or early the following week. Just in time for the long holiday weekend. Normally I wouldn’t complain about the 4th of July landing on a Wednesday, however what it does to our ground breaking plans may change my feeling on that. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Design, Main, building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.