I wanted to give a short update on our progress over the last week.  We are in the feasibility and finance contingency period on the land sale.  We heard back from the bank early in the week and have pre-approval on both the land and construction loans. Financing land and construction is a lot harder than financing a non-custom home.  We have our current mortgage with Wells Fargo and recently refinance down to a 3.5% interest rate.  I have been very happy with Wells Fargo and even transferred all of our personal banking there after we got the mortgage.  However, they won’t do a land financing and their terms & rates for a construction loan are pretty bad.

Fortunately our real estate agent Joe has been proactive as usual and found us a great banker at Banner Bank that is very experienced in both land and construction lending. We met them last week and they pre-approved us for the land mortgage on the spot, they sent all the forms for electronic signature and pre-approved us for the construction loan a few days later.

If you are looking for either a land or construction mortgage or both contact: Bruce Briton @ Banner Bank.

We also met with the architect firm that will be doing the feasibility study on our land earlier this week.  They didn’t see any major issues with the land and the area that we are thinking about building the house.  They have arranged a geo-tech study and a septic system assessment that will happen over the next two weeks.