You lost your home to foreclosure a couple years ago. Can you apply for a new mortgage today?

Maybe. But it all depends on the steps you’ve taken to build your credit score since your foreclosure.

“A lot of people think that once they lose a home to foreclosure that they can never apply for a mortgage loan again,” says Rick Bettencourt, branch manager for Mortgage Network in Danvers, Massachusetts. “That’s not true. But you do have to work to rebuild your credit. That’s the No. 1 step.”

A foreclosure has the potential to bring your credit score down more than 100 points, depending on your starting credit score, according to FICO. And that doesn’t even include the damage that your score already suffered from all those missed mortgage payments that led up to your foreclosure.

This big credit-score plunge is unfortunate. Lenders today rely heavily on your credit score to determine how likely you are to default on mortgage payments. A low score means that you have a history of missed payments or negative financial judgments, such as a foreclosure. So the lower your credit score, the more lenders will hesitate to loan you money.

There is hope, though: To qualify for a mortgage after a foreclosure, you’ll need to rebuild your credit. Fortunately, you can steadily boost your credit score by making smart financial decisions.

You’ll also need to be patient: Expect in most cases to wait at least a couple years after a foreclosure before you consider applying for a new mortgage.

The wait

A foreclosure remains on your credit report for seven years, but its impact lessens over time. A six-year-old foreclosure does not exert the same negative pull on your credit report as does one that’s only a few months old.

You’ll still have to be patient, though. It could take as little as a couple years, and up to seven years, before you’re eligible for a mortgage, depending on who’s backing the loan.

The key, though, is to rebuild your credit score before you start researching mortgage rates. After all, the higher your credit score is, the better you look to lenders.

“You need to spend the time after a foreclosure on rebuilding your credit score,” says Don Frommeyer, chief executive officer of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. “It’s time to make the good financial decisions necessary to convince lenders that your foreclosure won’t happen again.”

Back to the basics

Anthony Sprauve, senior consumer credit specialist for FICO, says that consumers who go back to the basics of good credit management can rebound from foreclosure to again qualify for a home loan.

“They do need to be patient, though,” Sprauve says. “It is going to take some time to rebound from where they were and the fall they took as a result of foreclosure. But absolutely they can come back.”

First, you need to pay every bill on time every month, as payment history accounts for 35 percent of your credit score.

You should also keep the balances on your credit cards as low as possible. That’s because credit utilization — how much of your available credit you use — accounts for another 30 percent of your credit score. Sprauve recommends that consumers use no more than 30 percent of their available credit. As an example, if you have a credit card with a credit limit of $1,000, you should have a balance of no more than $300 on that card.

Finally, consumers — and this might not be an issue for consumers who have recently suffered a foreclosure — should only open new credit when necessary, Sprauve said.

“I compare it being on a diet,” Sprauve says. “You might have eaten too much pie on Thanksgiving, but the next morning you get up, eat a healthy breakfast, exercise and start over again. It’s the same way with rebuilding your credit. You might have fallen with a foreclosure, but you can get up and start over again.”