No. You can start using Padzilly straight away without a lender approval. It just works better once you have one, and it is worth understanding the difference.
When you create your account, Padzilly asks you for two figures:
Your maximum monthly payment — the most you are comfortable paying, taxes, insurance and HOA included
Your available funds — your cash for the down payment and closing costs
From those, Padzilly builds a Temporary Loan Profile. It assumes a conventional loan with 5% down and uses your two numbers as the limits.
That is enough to make the whole platform work: the search filters, the payment and cash figures on every listing, OfferPro, AutoQualify, favorites, comparisons and saved search alerts.
One thing you do need: an account. Browsing as a guest does not give you a profile, and the payment and cash filters stay locked until there is one.
They are arithmetic done properly on an assumption. The assumption is a reasonable one, but it is still an assumption:
Your real interest rate will not be the assumed rate
Your real loan program may not be conventional
Your lender's own rules — such as a minimum qualifying property tax — are not being applied
So the numbers are useful for narrowing down neighbourhoods and learning what your money buys. They are not the basis for an offer.
Ask your loan officer to upload your approval through LoanLink — it is free for them, and you invite them with just their name and email.
The moment they do:
Your actual terms apply. Your rate, your loan program, your limits.
Your lender's rules apply. Including any minimum qualifying property tax, which can raise every payment you have been looking at.
Homes outside your approval drop out. The filters start measuring against a real decision, so you stop spending evenings on houses you were never going to get.
Qualification letters become real. Calculated from your approval, which is the document a seller's agent takes seriously.
The profile card changes from Temporary Loan Profile to Pre-Approved Loan Profile, so you can see at a glance which one you are on.
Start today with the temporary profile. Explore, save homes, learn the market.
But get the approval in before you make an offer. An estimate tells you a house is probably possible. An approval tells a seller you can actually close — and those are very different conversations.
