Step 3: Decide how you will apply

There are two ways to go about this - you can go to each individual lender and apply yourself in person, or you can get a mortgage broker to do it for you. I am not aware of any other way, but if you are put it as a comment and I will edit this.

We decided to go for a mortgage broker, as it is going to be our first time buying a house so we need all the help and advice we can get. There are a lot out there and we selected Homeloans who seem quite good so far (keep reading and I will keep reporting). They allow you to apply online at - http://www.homeloans.ie/
I have not figured out why they have the online application forms as they called me back and sent out forms where we filled out the same details. I mention this as if you use them you may want to just ring and get the forms rather than fill out the forms twice.

We actually found it quite good as it pointed out the information we needed. Of course you can just look at my previous post and find out!

Things I hadn't known:

• Mortgage brokers are paid by the lenders, not by you
• You get approval, but the lender may still turn you down later if they discover something new about you
• How scared you become about that overdue credit card bill from 10 years ago

Once we had all the right forms filled out and documents gathered we sent them on to the mortgage broker. We sent them by swiftpost which cost a few euros but it would have cost a lot more to replace the documents if they were lost.