Should we have an agreement in principle before we start viewing properties?

[Cheesymonster]

We put our house on the market in June and we accepted an offer within the week. Our chain (of 3) wasn't prepared to wait for us to find a property so we completed on our sale and are living with relatives until we find somewhere to buy. We did have an agreement in principle but it has expired and our mortgage adviser told us that to keep applying over and over would damage our credit score. We are in a good position as we have nowhere to sell and a cash deposit but we haven't applied again for an AIP. For the last month or so absolutely nothing has come onto the market in the area we want but hopefully this will change soon and in fact we are viewing a house on Saturday so my question is should we have an agreement in principle before we start viewing and making offers? What did you do?

See if it comes up - tell EAs you have a mortgage broker and are ready to go when you find somewhere. If you are really interested in a house you see, there are plenty of lenders where an AIP can be done online and is a soft credit check so won't affect your credit rating.

We just said we had it all sorted when in reality what we'd done was spoken to a broker & knew what we could borrow etc, then when we had offer accepted he sorted out aip for us within a day or so.

Our broker said the same thing but he was happy to speak to any estate agent and tell them he'd qualified us. We also found that once you tell an estate agent you've sold and have money sitting in the bank, things like AIPs become much less relevant.

That's really set my mind at rest, thank you all.