What this page is about
A great many people in Houston do not have a W-2. Consultants and contractors working around the energy industry, independent practitioners and staffing contractors near the Texas Medical Center, construction and trades businesses, truckers, rideshare and delivery drivers, salon owners, real-estate agents, small importers and exporters near the port.
If that is how you earn, you have probably been told — or assumed — that buying is harder for you. The honest answer is that it is different, not harder, provided you talk to someone before you start looking at houses.
Why does self-employment complicate a mortgage application?
Because the number a traditional mortgage review starts from is your net profit after deductions, not the money that moved through your accounts. Your accountant’s job is to make that number as small as the law allows. The result is that two people with identical cash flow can look completely different on paper.
Alternative documentation exists to close that gap. Instead of starting from a tax return, the review starts from deposits into your accounts over a defined period.
What is alternative documentation, in plain terms?
It is a family of approaches — bank statement review, 1099-based review, profit-and-loss review, and asset-based approaches — that document income in a way that fits how you actually get paid. All Western Mortgage was built around this kind of lending, which is a large part of why I work here.
Which one fits you depends on how your business is structured, how you are paid, and how long you have been doing it. That is a conversation, not a form.
What does the Houston market look like right now?
The median price of a single-family home sold in the Houston market was $340,000 in July 2026, on 8,340 single-family sales, with active listings at 40,750 and a five-and-a-half-month supply (Houston Association of REALTORS, July 2026 Housing Market Update, released 12 August 2026). Statewide, the Texas median home price was $342,900 in June 2026 with a 5.4-month supply (Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, June 2026 data).
I include those figures because supply is the part of the market that decides how much time you get. A market with real inventory is a market where a well-prepared self-employed file can compete calmly.
Two Texas details worth knowing early
Texas is a community property state: under the Texas Constitution, Article XVI, Section 15, property acquired during a marriage is community property unless it arrived by gift, devise or descent. In practice that mostly affects who signs, not who qualifies — but finding out at the closing table is a poor way to find out.
The second is Article XVI, Section 50(a)(6) of the Texas Constitution, which governs borrowing against the equity in a Texas homestead. It sets conditions no other state has, including a limit of eighty percent of the home’s fair market value on the total debt secured by the homestead. If part of your plan involves taking cash out of a home you already own to fund something else, that provision shapes what is possible.
What working on your file looks like
I do not send a generic checklist. Once I understand how you earn, I send a specific list for your situation and tell you why each item matters. If something in the file is going to raise a question during underwriting, I would rather find it in week one than in week five.
What this page will never tell you
You will not find a rate, a payment estimate, or a calculator here. Pricing depends on the full picture of a specific file, and quoting a number before I know yours would be guesswork dressed up as advice. When we talk, we talk about your actual situation, and the application, pricing and disclosures happen on All Western Mortgage systems.