This one's a little different — we recorded it live, right in the middle of one of my home buyer workshops.

So instead of me talking at you for thirty minutes, you're getting a front-row seat to real buyers asking real questions, next to a lender who answers them for a living.

I'm Mickey Lawrence, a licensed Realtor in Georgia and Texas, and my whole job is helping buyers actually understand the home buying process — not just handing them a checklist and hoping for the best. A house is probably the biggest purchase of your life, and you deserve to walk into it confident, not confused.

In this workshop, my guest lender Brandi Hill of Guild Mortgage broke down the parts of this process nobody explains well:

Pre-approval vs. pre-qualification — and why the difference costs people houses. A pre-qualification is Brandi taking your word for it. A pre-approval is Brandi verifying it — pay stubs, W-2s, bank statements, an actual run through Automated Underwriting. When you're standing in front of a seller with an offer, that's the difference between "I think I can" and "I already proved I can."

The three things you actually need. Credit score, debt-to-income, and cash. Lenders generally want your total debt — including the new mortgage — under 50% of your income. Get those three things lined up and, as Brandi put it, the rest becomes child's play.

The number one thing that quietly kills a pre-approval. New debt. A car note two months before closing can cost you more buying power than a lower credit score ever would — because that monthly payment gets added straight to your qualifying ratios. Even unused existing credit can move the number. Lenders re-pull credit right before closing specifically to catch this.

Down payment assistance most Atlanta buyers have never heard of. Georgia Dream (statewide), Atlanta Housing Authority, Invest Atlanta, and Fulton County's HOP program — and two of them can potentially be layered together for up to roughly $40,000 in combined assistance, if the property falls in the right zip codes for both. Some of these are forgivable over time. Some you repay in full — even on a paid-off house — whenever you sell or refinance. Read the fine print before you count on any of it as free money.

Are those free credit-score apps even accurate? Short answer: not wrong, just a different score for a different purpose. Expect the mortgage-specific pull to land 25–30 points lower than what Credit Karma or a bank app shows you.

NACA, explained plainly. No down payment, no closing costs, no minimum credit score requirement — real program, real track record — but budget real time for the process if you're trying to move fast.

"You don't have bad credit — you have no credit." One of the most useful reframes in the whole session: a thin credit file can produce a low score that has nothing to do with how responsible you actually are with money. The fix isn't always repair. Sometimes it's building the right trade lines from scratch.

A huge thank you to Brandi Hill with Guild Mortgage for making complicated lending information make sense to an entire room, and to Black Pizza Bankhead for hosting us in their speakeasy — a space that sits on Joseph E. Boone Boulevard, a corridor with real Atlanta history behind it (more on that below).

As always: program availability and requirements change. Confirm every detail with a qualified lender before making a decision — nothing here is a guarantee of eligibility.

Nobody's going to hand you a perfect moment. There isn't one. There's just information, and what you do with it.

A pre-approved buyer, a great house, and then the insurance quote came back — and the payment they'd planned their life around went up a couple hundred bucks.

That's the story of 2026 in both my states. Insurance is no longer a closing-day formality. It's a qualification issue, a negotiation issue, and a deal killer.

This week: Georgia premiums up 8.6% in 2025 and 39.7% since 2021; Texas up 60% since 2019 against 30% nationally; why you need a real quote in the first 48 hours under contract; rates holding at 6.67% (the whole year-over-year increase is $24 a month on a $400K loan); 37 straight months of price gains and what "4.6 months of supply" actually buys you; why the Fed's Sept 15–16 meeting won't move your mortgage; builders sitting on 9.3 months of inventory with 63% offering incentives — and the three moves that get you a piece of it. Plus the full 2027 buyer's playbook.

I'm Mickey Lawrence, licensed Realtor in Georgia and Texas. 770-373-4944 · settleinatl.com · @listwithmick

Educational content only. Not financial, tax, or insurance advice. Equal Housing Opportunity.

Rates went up, builders went down, here's who wins.

Mortgage rates hit 6.66% this week — the highest all summer. Same week, builders cut the median new home price to $398,300, the lowest in a year. If you're thinking "Mickey, those two things don't even go together, bro" — you're right. They don't. And that gap is where the money is this month.

I'm Mickey Lawrence, a licensed Realtor in Georgia and Texas. This is the show where we take the real estate news that sounds complicated, expensive, and vaguely threatening, and translate it into plain English. Not what this means for the economy — what it means for your payment, your equity, your closing date, your peace of mind.

In this episode:

The Fed held for a fifth straight meeting — and three officials voted to RAISE. The vote was 9–3, and all three dissenters wanted a quarter-point hike. For two years every conversation has been "when do they cut?" This week three of them said maybe we go up. The dot plot has most officials seeing 3.6%–4.1% at the end of 2026. Nobody up there is drawing a picture where rates fall off a cliff. So stop waiting for the rescue — refinancing exists, repurchasing does not.

6.66% is not the number you should care about. Five straight weeks of increases, 23 basis points in a month. But a year ago the 30-year averaged 6.72% — we're still below last summer. On a $400,000 loan that entire five-week run cost you about $60 a month. Negotiating $15,000 off the purchase price saves you about $100 a month. The rate moved a little. The negotiating room moved a lot.

Builders are the most motivated sellers in America right now. 9.3 months of standing inventory versus 4.6 months in the existing-home market, and 61% of builders handing out incentives like Halloween candy. A builder is not an emotional seller — a builder has a construction loan, a lender, a quarterly earnings call, and a spec home with grass somebody has to mow. Inside: why they'd rather give you an $18,000 rate buydown than cut the sticker, and the three moves to make before you walk into a model home — including bringing your agent on the first visit, not the second.

Insurance is the line item that quietly wrecks deals. Georgia is projected up ~10% on top of last year's 9%. Check your dwelling coverage against rebuild cost, and find out if your wind/hail deductible is flat or a percentage — 2% on a $500,000 rebuild is $10,000 out of your pocket.

Property tax fights in both my states. Texas SB4 raised the school district homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 for the 2026 tax year, and SB23 took the 65-and-older/disabled exemption from $10,000 to $60,000. Georgia's HB 581 capped taxable value growth — but Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and Chatham opted out. Know which side of that line you're on.

And the credit wall came down. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eliminated the 620 minimum credit score on conventional loans. If a lender told you no in the last two years because of your score, get re-quoted. That's not a sales line — that's a policy change.

Atlanta: 34,149 homes for sale in June. Inventory up 9.8% year over year, sales down 3%, median single-family price flat at $425,000, townhome median down 2.7%. That's a buyer's market forming in slow motion.

Houston: 8,820 single-family homes sold in June, up 3.5% year over year. Active listings up 2.1% to 38,839, with 5.2 months of inventory. More supply and more sales — the healthy version of high inventory.

Nobody's going to hand you a perfect moment. There isn't one. There's just information, and what you do with it. The people who build real wealth in real estate aren't the ones who timed it — they're the ones who understood it and moved.