Henry Jones

The most important thing I can tell any buyer right now is this: get fully pre-approved before you fall in love with a house. Not pre-qualified — fully pre-approved. There's a real difference, and it's the difference between having your offer taken seriously and watching a seller choose someone else. Pre-qualification is a 10-minute exercise based on self-reported information. It looks like a real approval letter but carries almost no weight with a motivated seller. Full pre-approval means a lender has verified your income, employment history, asset statements, and credit — and underwriting has signed off. That letter tells a seller you are a real buyer who can close. Beyond that, here are the things I tell every buyer I work with: • Know your full monthly cost — not just the mortgage payment. Property taxes, insurance, and potential PMI can add $400–$700 per month above your principal and interest. Budget for the real number, not the listing price number. • Ask about down payment assistance programs before you assume you need $20,000 saved. Illinois has programs that can put up to $15,000 toward your down payment and closing costs. Most buyers have never heard of them because most agents don't know enough about the financing side to bring them up. • Don't make any major financial changes between pre-approval and closing. No new credit cards, no large purchases, no job changes. The financing picture that got you approved needs to stay intact until you have keys in hand. • Shop for a professional who can answer both the property question and the financing question. Most buyers work with an agent for the search and a separate lender for the money — and those two people rarely work from the same plan. When they don't, deals fall apart or buyers end up with a home that doesn't fit their actual financial picture. I hold both a real estate license and a lending license. When I work with buyers, the search strategy and the financing strategy are built together from day one. That means the home you find is one you can actually close on — at terms that make sense for your life, not just your lender's checklist.

The first thing I tell every seller is: the biggest risk to your transaction isn't the market, it isn't the price, and it isn't your home's condition. It's the gap between your agent and your lender. In a standard listing, your real estate agent handles the strategy and a separate lender handles your buyers' financing. Those two professionals work for different companies and rarely coordinate in any meaningful way. The result: buyers walk through your home who can't actually qualify at the terms being presented. Offers come in that look strong but don't survive the financing contingency. You find out your real net proceeds two days before closing instead of two months before. I call this the Coordination Tax — and it costs sellers in this market real money. Here's my specific advice to avoid it: • Before you list, understand what a qualified buyer actually looks like at your price point at current rates. This requires someone who runs financing numbers, not just comparable sales. Price your home to attract those buyers — not to match what sold two years ago. • When offers come in, evaluate buyer qualification, not just purchase price. The highest offer is not always the best offer. A fully pre-approved buyer at $215,000 is worth more than a soft pre-qualified buyer at $219,000. • Use seller concessions strategically. A seller-funded rate buydown can expand your qualified buyer pool at a fraction of the cost of a price reduction. For most homes in the $180K–$280K range, a 1-point buydown costs approximately $2,000 and achieves the same buyer response as a $10,000 price cut. • Set a communication standard with your agent upfront. Demand weekly updates — not when there's news, every week. The sellers who feel blindsided at the end of a transaction almost always describe a period of silence in the middle. That silence is when things go wrong. The structural solution to all of this is working with one professional who manages both sides of your transaction. I hold both a real estate broker license and a lending license. Your listing strategy and your buyer qualification requirements are built together from day one — which is why my listings close when they should instead of unraveling when they shouldn't.

In 21 years in this market, I've worked with nearly every type of seller and buyer the Chicago Southland and Northwest Indiana markets produce. The honest answer is: I've seen every version of this. The clients I've worked with include: • First-time homebuyers who came in thinking they couldn't afford to buy — and left with keys. Many of them qualified for down payment assistance programs they'd never heard of. Watching someone close on their first home when they arrived convinced the numbers would never work is one of the most satisfying transactions I have. • Move-up sellers who needed to sell and buy simultaneously without everything falling apart. This is one of the most logistically complex transactions in real estate — and it's where the dual-license advantage matters most. I've coordinated the sell-side closing and the buy-side closing in the same week for families who were told it couldn't be done that cleanly. • Sellers with expired listings — people who had listed with another agent, sat on the market for 90 to 150 days, and came to me after the contract ended. In most cases the problem wasn't the house or the price. It was a failure of coordination between the listing strategy and what buyers could actually finance. • Distressed property sellers — I handled 900+ foreclosure and distressed transactions during and after the 2008 housing crisis. This market in the south suburbs was one of the most severely affected in the country during that period. I worked through it transaction by transaction. That experience taught me more about what actually causes deals to close — and fail — than anything else in my career. • Investors and landlords — from single-family rentals to small multi-unit portfolios in the Chicago Southland market. I understand DSCR financing, non-QM loan products, and the buy-and-hold strategies that make sense in this specific market. • Relocating families — both buyers moving into the Chicago Southland area and sellers moving out. Relocation transactions require speed and precision on both sides. Having one professional managing the real estate and the financing simultaneously is what makes those timelines work. What all of these clients have in common: they needed someone who could see the full picture. Not just the listing side. Not just the lending side. Both sides, at the same time, from one professional who is accountable for the whole transaction.

There's one from the south suburbs that I think about often — not because it was the biggest transaction, but because it almost didn't happen at all. A family came to me after their listing had expired with another agent. They'd been on the market for 127 days. Two price reductions. One offer that fell apart at the financing contingency — the buyer had submitted a soft pre-approval issued on self-reported income, and when the lender ran the actual numbers, the buyer couldn't close. The sellers lost three months and two price reductions on a buyer who was never qualified to begin with. When they came to me, they were exhausted and skeptical. They'd done everything their previous agent asked. They couldn't understand why the house hadn't sold. The first thing I did was run a buyer pre-qualification analysis at their price point — not on the house, but on the financing picture. At the price range they were in, I identified exactly which buyer profiles could qualify at current rates and what financing structure would attract the most serious offers. Their previous pricing strategy had been based entirely on comparable sales. It didn't account for where the qualified buyer pool actually sat. We relisted at $192,500 — a strategic reduction that reflected real market positioning, not desperation. I built a seller-funded rate buydown into the offering strategy: a buyer could accept a seller concession that lowered their effective rate by 0.75 points. That expanded the qualified buyer pool at a fraction of what another price reduction would have cost. Five showings in the first 12 days. Two offers. We accepted at $196,800 — above the relisting price — from a fully pre-approved FHA buyer whose qualification I had confirmed before the showing was even scheduled. Closed in 28 days. What made that transaction meaningful wasn't the numbers — it was the moment at closing when that family finally exhaled. They'd been carrying the weight of a failed listing for almost five months. Watching them close on their terms, in less than a month, after everything they'd been through — that's the one I keep coming back to.

I came into real estate the way a lot of people do — I saw a problem that needed solving and couldn't stop thinking about it. I grew up in the Chicago Southland area. I watched families in this community navigate one of the most consequential financial transactions of their lives with almost no real guidance. They were handed from agent to lender to title company, and nobody was managing the full picture. Deals fell apart. People lost money they couldn't afford to lose. And the professionals involved would shrug and move on to the next transaction. That bothered me. So I got licensed. The early years were what you'd expect — learning the market, building a client base, making mistakes and learning from them faster than I would have liked. But the thing that changed my practice more than anything else was the 2008 housing crisis. This market — the south suburbs, Cook County, Northwest Indiana — was hit hard. I worked through 900+ distressed and foreclosure transactions during that period. It was the most difficult stretch of my career and the most educational. I saw every way a real estate transaction can go wrong. I learned what actually causes deals to survive under pressure and what causes them to collapse. I learned that the gap between the real estate side and the financing side isn't just an inconvenience — it's where families lose their homes. Five years ago I went back and got my mortgage loan officer license. Not to do more business — to close that gap. Because after two decades of watching it cost people money, I decided the right answer was to be the professional who manages both sides instead of hoping two separate professionals would talk to each other. Twenty-one years later, I'm still in the same market I started in. Still working with families in Chicago Southland and Northwest Indiana. The transactions are different. The market is different. What hasn't changed is why I got into this — and what I'm trying to do every time I sit down with a client.

The most significant thing I can tell you isn't a certification — it's a credential combination that very few real estate professionals in this market hold simultaneously. I am both a licensed Illinois Real Estate Broker (License #471.004103) and a licensed Mortgage Loan Officer (NMLS #2514797). In practice, that means I manage the real estate side of your transaction and the financing side in the same office, with the same professional accountability for both. Most transactions involve two separate professionals for these two functions. Your listing agent handles the real estate strategy. A lender handles your buyers' financing. Those two people work for different companies, carry different incentives, and rarely work from a unified plan. The gap between them — what I call the Coordination Tax — is the most common cause of failed transactions in this market. When one professional holds both licenses, that gap doesn't exist. The listing price, the buyer qualification requirements, the offer evaluation strategy, and your net proceeds calculation are all managed by the same person with full visibility into both sides of the transaction. Beyond the dual license, my education includes: • 21 years of active real estate practice in the Chicago Southland and Northwest Indiana markets — including 900+ distressed and foreclosure transactions during and after the 2008 crisis, which represents a level of transaction complexity that standard market conditions rarely produce • Comprehensive training in FHA, VA, conventional, DSCR, non-QM, and down payment assistance loan programs — including Illinois Access Home, which provides up to $15,000 toward down payment and closing costs for eligible buyers • Deep familiarity with Cook County property tax assessment and appeal processes — a financial consideration that affects both listing strategy for sellers and total cost of ownership for buyers • Ongoing continuing education in both real estate and mortgage lending — required to maintain both active licenses and reflecting a commitment to staying current in both disciplines The practical benefit to clients: you don't need to hope your agent and your lender are communicating. You don't need to coordinate between two separate professionals or wonder if something fell through the gap. One call. One professional. Both sides of your transaction managed together from day one.