The big day is finally here!  You’ll receive directions to the closing attorneys office from your agent and all you need to bring with you is yourself, your drivers license or official government picture id (so that they can confirm that you are who you say you are) and we also recommend that you bring your personal checkbook as well in case any minor, last minute changes need to be made to the settlement statement after you already sent your wire.  They will accept a personal check for these differences as long as they are less than $500 in general.

Closings usually take about an hour.  What you can expect at the closing is to be signing a LOT of papers.  The buyer does the majority of the signing at a closing because most of the paperwork is for your loan.  We will start out going through the HUD-1 settlement statement which you would have already seen.  The attorney will go line by line through to make sure you understand all of the numbers and then both buyer and seller will sign 7 copies or so of the settlement statement (one for buyer, seller, each of their agents, lender, attorney, etc… they all need originals of this particular document).  From there, you will start signing the standardized loan documents.  The attorney will go through them fast and point out where the blanks are filled in with the specifics of your loan details to make sure all is correct, but everything else is standard paperwork that is part of every loan.  Most people just sign away on these documents because they are all the same forms that you will sign for any loan in the country regardless of lender, and at the end of the day, there is no changing these documents.  If you don’t sign them, you don’t get to buy the home.

If however, you want to read every line of the loan documents, we can set up a time for you to come into the attorneys offices the day before closing.  You’ll need about 8 hours to get through everything, but it is certainly your right to do this if you want to read everything before signing.  On the day of closing, you will need to be able to get through these documents in the time allotted however so let us know early if you want us to arrange for you to come by the attorneys office on another day to read the documents more thoroughly.

If our contract dictates that you take possession of the home at closing, you’ll get the keys at the end of the closing and be able to drive over to your new home right away.