New to (commercial) REI - typical to get max loan approval prior?

[Steven Rogers]

I'm very new to real estate investing, but there is one thing I wanted to get clarified - is it typical for a person to already have a pre-approved loan for a given amount, before looking more seriously into buying a property?

Specifically, I'm wondering if it makes sense to already have some sort of pre-approval in order to know the max amount a bank will loan me, so I can get a sense of what my upper cap is. Is this typical, or will I look silly if I walked into a bank and asked for this?