I’ve been having the most terrible experience with my mortgage company and I was wondering if anyone out there has experience and/or advice on how I should handle things at this point, specifically whether any of the things I list below are worthy of complaint to the PA Department of Banking.
When I first started shopping for a home, I contact the mortgage division of a bank I’d dealt with in the past, and I spoke on a number of occasions to a guy named Chris, who was extremely helpful. Not only helpful, but very responsive. Several times, if I called him in the afternoon and he wasn’t able to get back to me before the end of the day, he called me in the evening or on the weekend. I was impressed…he seemed knowledgeable, professional and had stellar customer service skills.
Fast forward to 4 months later when I actually find a home. Chris meets with me (he came up to the bank branch closest to where I work so that I could apply for my mortgage on my lunch hour rather than having to take time off to drive down to his office about ½ an hour from where I work) and I sign all of the appropriate forms, turn in all of the required documentation, pay my loan origination fee and everything, AFAIK, is good to go. The only thing that I need to do, which can’t be done until I have the signed sales agreement from the seller, is to withdraw money from my 401k to pay the 1 point on the mortgage that is going to lock in my rate. Chris understands this and we agree that he’ll process my loan (which is to be a combination FHA/PHFA deal) at the standard rate and change it over to the lower PHFA rate when I pay my point.
I got my signed sales agreement the day before 9/11/01. I applied for my withdrawal the morning of 9/11, but that withdrawal was contingent on cashing in stocks as of the end of the trading day. Obviously, that held things up until the market reopened a week later.
During this time, I spoke to Chris and he assured me that things were fine and we’d move on to the next stage as soon as I got the money from my 401k. Then one day I tried to reach him and he never returned either the calls or the email I sent. I considered this odd, so I called the main number at his office and started pushing buttons on the auto-attendant until I got a live person. I explained my problem and they said “Oh…Chris doesn’t work here anymore.” HUH?? <pause while steam shoots out of Jadis’ ears> When was someone going to TELL ME???
They seemed properly apologetic, although they also made some thinly veiled references to Chris not keeping good records and that they didn’t know that my account was unattended, etc. This should have set off alarm bells, but I felt that I was too far into this process to seek a different bank to handle my financing at this point (it was approaching 3 weeks since I’d signed the contract on my house). I was assured that they would get all of my information together and it would be passed off to someone else who would give me a call the next day.
Enter Kathy. Kathy will henceforth be known as Demon Spawn From Hell.
DSFH calls me to review my file, we discuss where I was in the process, I send her the fee that Chris had been waiting on, she asks me to resubmit a few documents that she’s not able to locate in what Chris left behind and assures me once more that things are moving along.
Since then, I’ve experienced the following:
[list]
DSFH refuses to answer my calls for weeks at a time, prompting me to call her manager Gert (henceforth to be known as Manager Spawn From Hell).
MSFH gives me lip service apologies for DSFH’s lack of response, and tells me that due to a previous contract on my house not having cleared FHA’s records, my application had been held up at FHA. Why someone couldn’t have just told me this is beyond me, but she assures me that things are now moving along again and not to be concerned.
I wait a few more days (it is now approaching the end of October) and again try to reach DSFH to find out if my mortgage has been approved. No response.
I call MSFH and she tells me that they had just that very day received the commitment letter from the underwriters office and that she’ll have DSFH call me the next day to set a closing date. I find out later when I get the commitment letter in the mail that this is a lie, the letter had been issued almost a week prior.
DSFH calls me to set a closing date. I flip when she tells me that we can close on 11/2/01, since that means I’ll have to pay my landlord more rent. She agrees to rush things and sets my closing date for 10/31/01 instead. This means that I have a week to get the house inspected (which I wound up having to have my real estate agent attend due to a prior out-of-town work commitment on my part), get new gutters hung on the porches so that my FHA appraiser can come back out to approve the improvements I was required to make prior to close, arrange for insurance coverage so that the binder could be sent to the bank in time for close. I manage to get all of this arranged and I think we’re ready to close, until…
I get the commitment letter in the mail and discover that it’s the wrong loan type (straight FHA instead of FHA/PHFA) with the wrong interest rate (7% rather than 6%). I flip once again.
DSFH isn’t available when I call (go figure) so I rant at MSFH instead. She looks into it and calls me back only to tell me that they never submitted my application to PHFA, that Chris (who hasn’t been involved now for 6 of the 8 weeks I’ve been waiting) messed up the paperwork, blah blah blah. I tell her that this is a lie, since I specifically recall discussing the combination aspect of the loan with DSFH when we first spoke after Chris left, but whatever. There’s nothing I can do now except wait another 3 weeks.
About a week after the discussion above, I receive paperwork in the mail from the underwriter who’s putting together my package to send to PHFA. I flip, since it’s been another week of no activity, and because the paperwork that I was sent is dated 9/5/01…the original date of my mortgage application, and filled out in Chris’ handwriting. So much for Chris dropping the ball, huh? In any case, I fill everything out and call DSFH to find out what the street address is that I need to send this to (the provided postage-paid envelope had only a PO Box on it) so that I could FedEx the information overnight. DSFH tells me not to do that, that if I just run the paperwork down to the local branch, they’d interoffice it to her and she’d FedEx it at the bank’s expense. So I did.
The above happened last Friday. I carry on with my daily routine, thinking that DSFH received the paperwork on Friday, FedExed it out as agreed and that I’d be hearing on my approval any day (PHFA has a 3-day turnaround, so I’m told). Until this morning, when my real estate agent calls to tell me that she spoke to Lois (who will henceforth be known as Lois…she doesn’t deserve a nasty nickname, she appears to be the only reasonable and responsible person in that whole organization) and that Lois never received the information from DSFH. I go ballistic.
I play the auto-attendant game at the bank again, finally getting through to a woman named Debbie. Debbie does some digging and comes back to tell me that DSFH had been out sick Monday and Tuesday, but that the information had been FedExed yesterday. I call my real estate agent to tell her this, and she says “That’s interesting…I just got off the phone with DSFH and she told me she sent it out Monday. She lied to me.”
I’ve had it with these people. The constant lack of response, the outright lying, the insincere apologies I keep getting that result in absolutely no improvement in how my account is being handle are all serious issues for me. I totally feel as if they just don’t care because they know that I’m over a barrel here…there’s no way I can tell them all to go to hell and find other financing at this stage. By the time I close, the seller will have been waiting close to 3 months. They’re more than a little impatient as it is.
So, I guess my question is…has the team of people involved above done anything actionable that I should file a complaint on, or is it just a huge matter of extremely poor customer service?
I want to cry. 