Deal analysis without pre-approved financing: what benchmark do you use?

[Clayton Newman]

Hello,

I am early days in researching/learning and it's the holidays so I haven't reached out to lenders for pre-approvals yet.

In the absence of a pre-approval rate, what ballpark figure is least bad for evaluating deals? Assuming strong credit

I have been cutting my teeth on deal evaluation and there's a bit of a gap on what I'm plugging in from MND and what I see from Redfin/Zillow/Realtor. A 220k property will be coming in at a financing estimate of ~1.5-1.6k or so on Zillow/Redfin/Realtor, but if I plug in the MND rate into a mortgage calculator I'm seeing about 1k. Then bankrate comes up completely empty.  

I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this kind of disparity when evaluating a new market and how they navigate it.

Thank you for your time.