Primary Residence Loan Requirements - 1 year vs 6 mo - 2nd home

[Michael Conrad]

Hi All,

I am researching the time requirements between purchasing primary residences. I was told over the phone by a local lender in CO that I would be able to buy another home as a primary residence. My wife and I bought our current house as a primary residence and closed in April of this year, 2018. We now just put another house under contract to move into and we have just been told that we don't have sufficient enough reason to buy another primary residence and that it has NOT been a FULL 12 months. From what it sounds, this requirement used to be pretty subjective with underwriting and is now a hard law. Something about Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac restrictions.

I was searching the forums as I always do and came across a post from a few years ago with a similar discussion topic. I saw that several lenders mentioned 6 months for conventional financing and one year for FHA. We bought our first home with 5% down and conventional financing. We are hoping to do the same with this next home. I was curious if this is something that you can still do.

The property is in the same price range as our current home. It is also a little over 1 mile away from our current house. We would rent out our current home and the carriage house in back.

Our current closing date is at the end of January. I guess April is only 60 days out from that; so maybe that could be an option to delay closing if I could make it lucrative for the current seller? Just trying to be creative and solve problems here.

I appreciate your guys' help and would love to be able to follow through on this deal.

Thanks,

Conrad