Thirty days. Here is every single one of them.
Most lenders show you a five-step cartoon with a smiling family at the end. It hides the two things you actually need: where the time really goes, and where deals really die. So here is the whole thing — in order, with the days, and with the parts that go wrong. Nineteen of those thirty days are ours. The rest are yours, and almost nobody tells you that either.
Walk the whole thing. The house rises as you go.
Click any step — or press play and let it walk you through. Each one tells you what happens, how long it takes, and the thing that goes wrong at that exact moment.
A call. No credit pull, no documents, no commitment. You describe your situation — W-2 or self-employed, first home or fifth, clean credit or a bankruptcy you have already recovered from — and we tell you which doors are open, roughly what each one costs, and which one we would take if it were us.
Illustrative timings for a clean California file. Non-QM, self-employed income, condominium projects and multi-unit properties all add days — the calculator below will give you a realistic number for your own situation. Not a commitment to lend. Equal Housing Opportunity.
How long will your loan take?
Not the marketing number. Yours — with your loan type, your income, your property, and the one variable that matters more than all of them put together.
This is the only line on this page you control. It moves the closing date more than the loan type does.
This is the version where you answer the same day. Very few people get it.
Your file takes about 30 days. Every one of them is ours. That is the version where you answer the same day — and it is the version almost nobody gets.
Nineteen days are ours. The rest are up to you.
The teal slabs are the parts of the process we run — they overlap, and they are largely fixed. The coral slab is the one that changes: how long you take to answer.
We cannot make the appraiser faster. We can stop you from being the reason it is late.
Illustrative. Stages overlap in practice — the appraisal is ordered while processing runs, so the elapsed calendar is shorter than the sum of the parts. Lender turn times move with volume, and a busy market adds days to everything. The document-speed figure is the honest average across files, not a promise. Not a commitment to lend.
The week people quietly destroy their own loan.
You are approved. Clear to close. Then, somewhere around day twenty-two, a car gets bought. Credit is re-pulled before funding and employment is re-verified the day before — so the file you already passed gets underwritten again, with the new debt in it. Tick anything you are thinking of doing between now and the keys.
Every dollar of new monthly payment is a dollar the underwriter takes out of your mortgage. At this rate, $650 a month is $100,216 of house.
Between your approval and your keys, the correct financial strategy is to become extremely boring. No new debt, no new accounts, no job moves, no unexplained money.
Your credit will be re-pulled and your employment re-verified in the days before funding. The file that gets checked then has to look like the file that was approved.
It is the easiest step in the entire process, and it is the one people fail.
The whole process, one step at a time.
Open any step. Each one tells you what happens, what you need to have ready, how long it really takes, and the specific thing that goes wrong at that exact moment.
The parts nobody explains properly.
How long does a mortgage actually take in California?
About thirty days from accepted offer to keys on a clean conventional file. A Non-QM loan usually runs forty to forty-five. But the honest answer is that the loan type moves the number less than you do — a borrower who returns documents the same day closes roughly eleven days sooner than one who takes a week, and that is the single largest variable in the whole process.
What is the difference between pre-qualified and pre-approved?
Pre-qualified means somebody listened to you talk and typed it in. Pre-approved means an underwriter looked at your documents and your credit. Only one of them is worth anything in a multiple-offer situation, and only one of them survives escrow. If your letter arrived after a five-minute phone call and no paperwork, it is the first kind.
Does a pre-approval hurt my credit?
A mortgage credit pull is a hard inquiry and typically moves a score by a handful of points. Multiple mortgage inquiries inside a short shopping window are treated as one event by the scoring models, so shopping several lenders does not compound the damage. That is deliberate — the system wants you to shop.
Can I really lose my loan after I am approved?
Yes, and it happens most often in the last ten days. Credit is re-pulled and employment re-verified before funding. A car bought in week three, a new credit card, a job change, or a large unsourced deposit can all end a file that was already clear to close. The checklist above is not scaremongering — it is the list.
What happens if the appraisal comes in low?
You have four moves: renegotiate the price with the seller, bring the difference in cash, split it, or walk away if your contract has an appraisal contingency. There is also a fifth — a reconsideration of value, where we submit better comparable sales and ask the appraiser to look again. It does not always work, but it is free to try and most people are never told it exists.
Should I lock my rate or float it?
Locking is insurance, not a bet. It protects you from rates rising while your file is in process, and it costs you the chance to benefit if they fall. Ask two questions before you decide: how long is the lock, and is there a float-down? A thirty-day lock on a file that needs forty-five days is a trap, and an extension is not free.
What is the three-day rule at closing?
Federal law requires you to receive your Closing Disclosure at least three business days before you sign. That window exists so you can compare it, line by line, against the Loan Estimate you were given at the start. Read it. If a number moved and nobody told you why, ask before you sign, not after.
What does Adriana actually do that a call centre does not?
She reads your file on day two instead of day twenty-five. Nearly every deal that collapses was visible early — an income structure that will not document, a condo project that will not pass review, a deposit nobody can source. A call centre finds those things when the underwriter does. A broker who looks first finds them while there is still time to fix them.
It starts with twenty minutes.
No credit pull. No documents. No commitment. Just a conversation about which doors are open to you, what each one costs, and — if it applies — which one you should not walk through.