A lot of people think that buying a home in [Profile.market] is impossible if you have bad credit. Although having bad credit makes buying [Profile.market] real estate tougher, it's definitely not impossible. By understanding the loan process, what lenders look for and creative financing options, you drastically increase your chances of successfully buying a home in [Profile.market]

Step 1 - Understand the Loan Process

The first step is to understand the loan process. In order to get a bad credit loan, it's slightly more complicated than just walking into a lender's office. Often times you’ll have to do a little bit more homework.

If you're willing to wait, it does often help to spend a little bit of time improving your credit before applying for your loan. You can do this by balancing your credit cards so your utilization rate is no higher than 30% on all your credit cards, by not applying for new credit cards for 6-12 months, etc.

Step 2 - Know What Lenders Look For

Your credit score isn't the only thing lenders look at. In fact, although your credit score is important, it’s just one of the factors they look at.

Your income, employment history, DTI ratio all go into the lender's decision making process. Furthermore, not all lenders have the same level of strictness when approving a loan.

Even in a bad economy, there are subprime lenders. You can definitely expect to pay higher interest rates, but you can still refinance later once you’ve improved your credit rating through consistent payments.

Step 3 - Understand Creative Financing

If you truly cannot qualify for a bad credit loan through traditional means, you might want to look into creative financing alternatives. Even in [Profile.market], you can often arrange for creative financing options for a home purchase despite having bad credit.

For example, you might opt for getting a 2 year lease with an option to purchase. This gives you 2 years of "owning" your home, giving you time to improve your credit. At the end of 2 years, you apply for a loan again and buy your home for real.

There are many different creative financing options you can look into.

If you understand the loan process, understand what lenders are looking for and learn how to find creative financing deals, you too can own a home in [Profile.market] despite having bad credit.

There is a lot of free information available to you about buying, selling or investing in [Profile.market] real estate. For complete information about the [Profile.market] real estate market including current homes for sale, property values and more please visit the most complete website online dedicated to everything [Profile.market] real estate at www.livinginellicottcity.com . Please feel free to contact me with any of your real estate or mortgage related questions and I will be more than glad to answer your questions. Call me on my cell at [Profile.cell_phone] or email me at [Profile.email_link].

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