Temecula Valley Home Loans and Refinancing.

As your neighborhood real estate professionals, I've had the opportunity to work with amazing professionals. Today I will introduce you to another local expert to provide meaningful information. I'm Mitchell Jones, and this is the Low Down on Temecula Valley

Mitchell Jones
Well, I'm here today with Jeanette Hartman with American Pacific mortgage. She's a loan officer who is a resident of Temecula Valley for over 30 years. She has served our community through Mariana rotary for over 20 years. She also holds a board position for Habitat for Humanity. I could go on and on with everything that Jeanette has done in serving our community. But today we're going to talk about alone and especially for first time homebuyers. So Jeanette, tell us a little bit as a loan officer, what you do,

Jeanette Hartmann
One of the things that I do or the primary thing that I do is I help people get into a home loan, whether that's for a purchase or refinance, were purchased centric. So most of our business is based on purchases and I love to meet with my clients and help them figure out what their needs are and what the right loan is for them.

Mitchell Jones
Okay? No, that makes a lot of sense. I oftentimes as a real estate agent, I receive calls from folks who are wanting to buy their first home. How would you define a first time homebuyer?

Jeanette Hartmann
The definition for first time buyer from a program standpoint is that you haven't owned a home in the last three years. So not truly a first first home but you haven't owned it in the last three years. So what steps

Mitchell Jones
Should a first time home buyer take in trying to get approval for a loan or a purchase?

Jeanette Hartmann
We like to meet with our clients in person, especially my first time buyers because they haven't been through the process before. And they don't know what they're expected to do. So when I meet with them, it's usually a one hour consultation. we sit down and we talk about cash, credit and income. The three main things that you need to purchase a home most people think that they need more money than they actually do, especially if they meet the requirements for our first time homebuyer program. I've had people get into their first home for me, technically, you could get in with nothing down. But that's not realistic. In this area with our price points, people need to have five to $10,000 available, and then they're able to get into that first home.

Mitchell Jones
So we hear a lot about credit scores. And what if someone has a low credit score or a credit score that would prevent them from getting a first time home? What steps could they take to get to that place?

Jeanette Hartmann
So that's one of the things we review when we talk with them is we do pull credit, I will tell you that the credit score that we use is different than Credit Karma or what they see on what they're pulling from their own credit. So we have to go off a mortgage psycho score, we go off the middle of the three scores, and for my first time homebuyer program, we need a 645. So when we pull credit, our credit report tells us Hey, you don't you have the potential to get to this psycho. And it's not a credit repair program, but it will look at their accounts that they can pay down balances that they could pay down. Sometimes it'll ask them to get deleted from an authorized user account. Sometimes it'll tell them, hey, go charge $10 on this account, but we don't do credit repair. So if they need more help than that, we would refer them to somebody who does do credit repair.

Mitchell Jones
Okay? Well, what I really like about your model is the fact that your local, and they're not working with those,