FICO Scores for a Mortgage or Refi – What does it take?

If you use a credit card or Monrovia bank checking account’s online system, you may have noticed the appearance of a free service: FICO score tracking. You find it as a clickable area with a link title like “Your FICO^® score” or just “FICO^®.”

For many years, each of the major credit reporting agencies was mandated by law to honor any consumer’s request for a copy of their credit scores—but it was a once-a-year deal. For access to regular updates, you had to pay for a subscription. Particularly for consumers working to improve their credit scores, the paid services became a prudent monthly expense. The arrival of anytime free FICO score reporting eliminated much of that need.

Of course, tracking your FICO score is only useful if you know how the lending institutions will view it—and the answer to that is anything but clear-cut. Not only does each lender has their own confidential requirements, but since there are three separate reporting agencies, Monrovia consumers have three FICO scores (and they’re rarely the same).

Even so, let’s face it: the single piece of information most everybody wants to know is what FICO score is needed to buy a home? or to refinance a home? Even if the answer is imprecise, it’s human nature.

To quell that curiosity, at least one source is willing to report what amounts to an average of approximations: it’s called EllieMae^®. Ellie is a company that serves banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies by providing a raft of automated tools—but those are for industry insiders. As a sideline, they also put out a monthly Origination Insight Report with statistics drawn from the home loans processed through their systems—including some that most future Monrovia home loan applicants will be interested to learn:

Average FICO score for conventional mortgage refis closed last month: 732

Average score for conventional purchases: 752

Average for FHA purchases: 681

Average FICO score — all loans: 724.

Average time needed to close: 43 days.

The percentage of mortgage refis grew to 39% of all loans, probably because interest rates decreased “for the sixth straight month” to 4.2%. EllieMae reckons that constitutes “a new 2017 low”—something Monrovia refi and home loan applicants will be interested to know!

Those bargain basement interest rates continue to create a terrific opportunity for Monrovia real estate. Call me for a no-obligation discussion about how you might take advantage of the current real estate environment!

Augmented Reality: Next Monrovia Real Estate Tool

Monrovia real estate has greatly benefitted from one offshoot of “virtual” technology. Just click on a listing’s “virtual tour” button and a progression of two-dimensional views of the listed property parade across your laptop or smartphone screen.

Those Monrovia listing virtual tours are real estate’s first step toward “VR”—Virtual Reality. VR is the more immersive version that allows viewers to move around within three-dimensional renderings of computer-generated environments. A current example is the TV commercials depicting delighted VR goggle-wearers experiencing animated fictional worlds. They demonstrate two things: 1) the people who don the goggles look as if they truly do feel as if they are surrounded by a mind-bendingly realistic version of reality; and 2) they also look as if they are disconnected from the actual world around them (as when they duck to get out of the way of something that doesn’t really exist).

As it relates to Monrovia real estate, there is a slightly different emerging technology. You might say that it’s half-way between today’s virtual tours and full virtual reality. This is “AR”—Augmented Reality—which combines the real and virtual worlds. It allows consumers to superimpose computer-generated images into real life scenes. Some applications are already popping up, with more on the way thanks to support from the latest operating system releases which allow software developers to dream up applications that take advantage of the possibilities.

IKEA is one company that has developed an application to project how any given furniture model would look in a customer’s own home environment. Customers need a copy of the company catalog and access to IKEA’s website. Simply click on the sample item shown on the site, then position the catalog on the floor where the furniture would be placed. Just point your smartphone at the scene and take the picture—the app recreates the scene with the IKEA piece in place, properly scaled with lighting and shadows correctly rendered!

My guess is that it certain that Monrovia homeowners will soon have a lot of AR remodeling aids to help them visualize design choices. One countertop manufacturer has already developed an application that shows exactly what different surface finishes would look like atop an existing counter.

House hunters will benefit, too. The Realtor.com web developers are working on “augmenting reality” in the same way that Hollywood adds subtitles to movies. Their “Street Peek” application will allow house hunters to walk down a street, point their smartphone (Android, at first) at a house, and watch a cartoon bubble pop up over its roof with text showing whether it is for sale, the listing price or most recent sale price, and other information drawn from the NAR database. For Monrovia new home buyers choosing model home variations as well as for builders eager to show the potential of an unfinished space, the only current drawback is the difference between the look of the real thing and the computer-generated image. Count on that difference rapidly disappearing.

Whether you are buying or selling, I work to keep my clients informed about the coming advances in the tools affecting their Monrovia real estate options. Call me!