Katie was on the Happy Hour Call and shared that she just went under contract for a home. As a self-represented buyer, she was able to negotiate 2% off the list price AND a $7,500 closing cost credit for a total of nearly $20,000 in savings! This is huge!

Question: What does this process look like? I've submitted an offer already, and have been pre-approved with one lender, just waiting to hear back from the sellers on their response. Do I need to get pre-approved right away with a couple more lenders, and then make them compete against each other right after our offer is accepted? Or can I wait until our offer is accepted to get pre-approved and compete lenders against each other? We have a tight deadline, doing a 30-day close, so I don't want to do anything to slow it down, but I also don't want to get pre-approved before knowing if the sellers are going to accept our offer if I don't have to (since we'll otherwise be going with new construction and won't want to get pre-approved with additional lenders for several months--see "context" paragraph at the bottom for the reasoning). Do I even have time to shop lenders if we have such a tight close deadline, or should I just go with the one lender I already got pre-approved with? My original understanding was that you get pre-approved with 3-5 lenders before even starting the search, and then you choose your lender based on that. But I've since seen other sources say that you don't really get a good estimate until you are under contract, so you instead only need to get pre-approved with 1 ahead of time, and then shop lenders in the first 3-4 days after going under contract. So which is it? Given that I'm likely soon going to be either under contract or rejected, do I wait to see what happens? Or do I put a rush on getting pre-approved by a few lenders ASAP? Context: We're having a baby in the beginning of July. Originally, it looked like we were going to go with a new construction home, which would probably be finished around November--we are in line, just waiting for our lot to come up before moving forward with a contract. We got pre-approved with their preferred lender (or at least he called it pre-approval--it doesn't look like he did a hard pull on our credit), but since closing won't be for several months, and his pre-approval (or whatever he did) didn't involve a hard credit inquiry, we didn't get pre-approved with anyone else, to avoid a double ding on our credit score (since we'd have to get pre-approved again a month or 2 before closing). Then we unexpectedly found a great existing home we wanted, but we need to close in time to get moved in before the baby. So we quickly submitted an offer, and are waiting to hear back, and I don't know whether to try to get pre-approved right away with other lenders, or wait until seeing if the sellers accept our offer first. (It's been a couple days since we submitted the offer--we put in a fairly assertive offer since it's much more expensive than our other option, so I'm not surprised they didn't respond right away. Seller's agent says they are considering it though.)

We're first time home buyers, and the process of going without an agent is frankly pretty intimidating. (2.5-3% off the price is strong incentive to consider it though.) If we move forward without an agent, I really want to know the process inside and out. I want to know exactly what we need to do and when. Attached (in 2 file formats) is the result of my research efforts thus far. Is there anything that I'm missing, or that is inaccurate on here?