Right now, I’m sitting in a small local bank, waiting to speak to a loan officer?

I need to start making the proper connections, so I thought I’d get pre-approved for a mortgage as a first step by making a connection for my property purchasing plan.  Since I’m not entirely sure what I’m going (I’m still reading up on the process), I thought it would be best to test the waters with a small local bank just to get my feet wet.

I just recently drove through an area that I’m thinking of making a purchase and I thought I would describe it.

It’s a small (less than 4,000 total population) town that based around an resource mining company.  I’m sure most of the population is employed by the few local companies that are mining the earth for their manufactured product.  Driving around, I noticed a high amount of rental properties scattered throughout the small manufacturing town.

Even with a lot of rental properties, I didn’t notice too many “for rent” signs in the town.  I’m thinking that there could be a lot of renters in the area.  Driving around the area I’m thinking of buying, they people all seem like they are nice, happy looking people.

Although the neighborhood I’m looking at seems decent, I did notice that the neighbor across the street has a sign on his garage that says “Drunk Drive”, and there are a lot of plastic chairs and a big fire pit in the yard…  That might mean that perhaps they do more partying that I would like, but who knows.  Most likely, I’ll do a couple of weekend drive-bys to see how bad it really is.