Start with the lender and get pre-approved. An agent cannot do their best work until the money is real. Your price range, your comfortable monthly payment, and your loan program shape which homes are even worth touring. Walk in with a completed pre-approval and your agent knows exactly what to show you, you can move fast when the right house appears, and your offer carries more weight with a seller. No agent is ever unhappy to meet a buyer whose financing is already sorted. There is a deeper reason than logistics. Falling in love with a home before you know your numbers is how buyers talk themselves into bad financing, because a bad loan starts to look like the only way into the house they already want. Settling the money first protects you from that. This is where the two of us work as a team. Jeb will not send a buyer chasing homes until the financing is real, and he leans on our mortgage side because those pre-approvals are genuinely vetted; the file gets checked before the letter goes out. A real pre-approval tells you where you truly stand before you fall for a house. If you want that vetting done right, a free Roadmap conversation, about 20 minutes where we run your real numbers, gets you your actual qualification range and payment so you can start touring with confidence.