Down payment assistance is not automatically free money.

A lot of buyers walk into a home search thinking a preapproval letter is the hard part and down payment assistance is the easy part. This workshop replay flips that thinking. Recorded live and in person, it walks through exactly what a lender is really checking, what actually kills a preapproval, and why some of these assistance programs come with rules that can follow you for ten years or more.

I am Mickey Lawrence, a licensed Realtor with Keller Williams West Atlanta and Metro Realty Advisors, licensed in both Georgia and Texas. My job is not to hand you a checklist and hope for the best. It is to make sure you understand every decision you are making, because a house is probably the biggest purchase of your life and you deserve to walk into it with confidence.

In this workshop:

I sit down with Guild Mortgage loan officer Brandi Hill in front of a live room of buyers to break down the real difference between a preapproval and a prequalification, and why sellers take one far more seriously than the other. We cover what happens if a lender cannot approve your file, why a preapproval is good for a full 120 days, and the exact kind of call Brandi gets at ten o clock at night when a buyer falls in love with a house they were not ready to offer on.

We get specific on what a lender actually needs from you, why self employed buyers need two years of tax returns and not just a number they say out loud, and the one thing that quietly kills more preapprovals than anything else, opening new debt at the worst possible time.

Then we go deep on down payment assistance in Atlanta and Fulton County. Brandi names four programs most buyers in the room had never heard of, the Georgia Dream program, the Atlanta Housing Authority program, Invest Atlanta, and Fulton County's HOP program, including which of them can be layered together for up to around 40,000 dollars in combined assistance. We also cover the NACA program, the difference between a repayable and a forgivable award, and why selling too early can mean paying that assistance back.

Near the end, a buyer in the room gets real about where his own credit stands, and Brandi walks through the difference between having bad credit and simply not having enough credit yet, and how that gets fixed.

Recorded live at Black Pizza Bankhead on Joseph E Boone Boulevard Northwest Atlanta, a speakeasy style space with real history behind it. The corridor was formerly Simpson Road and was once a connecting line into one of the birthplaces of Atlanta's Black middle and upper class, just south of the Herndon Home, built in 1910 by Atlanta's first Black millionaire, Alonzo Herndon.

Homeownership does not have to be the forever home or the dream home. It just has to be the setup for the rest of your life.

Mickey Lawrence, Realtor, Georgia and Texas
Call or text 770 373 4944, office 770 615 6122
Everything else, guides, down payment assistance, and all my socials at linktr.ee/settleinatl