Buying your first home is as exciting as it is daunting. You don’t know whether you should go to your bank to ask for a loan – you trust them and you have been with them for years, after all – or shop around to try to find a better deal, but risk being taken advantage of or snared by complicated sub-clauses and fine print. Before filling in a Florida mortgage loan application, you need to know what it is you’re getting yourself into.

Obviously your prime concern is going to be the interest rate. Most interest rates will be at around similar levels, adjusted by your credit score of course – that’s at least one good thing about the global financial crisis! However, different companies use different methods to credit score you when you submit your Florida mortgage loan application, so sometimes going straight to your own bank might not get you the best rates.

If you want to get the best mortgage interest rates in Florida, you will have to do a great deal of shopping around. You’ll need to use lots of quote comparison websites, and even phone friends who might have recently bought houses, to see where they got their loans and what kinds of rates they got. You’ll need to use lots of quote comparison websites, and even phone friends who might have recently bought houses or had mortgage refinancing, to see where they got their loans and what kinds of rates they got.

Credit scoring is never an absolute process, and different methods are used by different companies. You can sometimes shave up to 5% off your mortgage interest rate simply by going next door, because that bank or institution outsources their credit checks to another credit scoring agency.

Lastly, if you need any help with your mortgage application you should simply pop into your own bank, or any estate agent. Why an estate agent and not your bank? Simple: your bank wants you to buy the cheapest house at the highest interest rate, but your estate agent wants you to buy the most expensive house you can afford, at the lowest rate possible!