When applying for a home loan, you’ll often need to get a credit report so that your lender will be able to give you an idea of the amount of the loan that you will be able to secure. After all, you don’t want to spend 2 weeks looking at $500,000 houses and later come to find out that you only qualify for a $250,000 loan.

Prior to going to a lender, it’s often a good idea to do your own credit report so that if there are any bad marks on it, you’ll be aware of them, and you may even be able to start amending them prior to securing a home loan.

The difference in pre-qualification and pre-approval is that a lender can guesstimate the amount of the loan you’ll be able to recieve based on income, debt, etc. and no credit report is necessary with pre-qualification, and with pre-approval, the lender will have to take an in depth look at your credit report to determine exactly the amount that you will be able to secure in a loan.