Wells Fargo Blew Up My New House

The BBQ Pit
1

Wells Fargo – “Documents will be ready Friday.” Too bad the closing date was last Monday.

I’m not going to go into the whole sordid tale, as it would take all day and probably bring us all to tears, so just let me sum up (it’s still long – sorry)…

We’re buying a house. We’ve owned homes before, this one will actually be our fourth, and have always gone through Washington Mutual for our home loans. The loan process was always quite easy with WAMU (some would say that was their downfall), but with their changeover to Chase, we were a little uneasy going there this time. Our realtor recommended Wells Fargo, and they seemed to have received some good press lately, so we said “Wells Fargo it is.”

That was our first mistake. And possibly our last, as you’ll see.

We’re thinking about making an offer, so we talk to Wells Fargo. We both have jobs and don’t look too scruffy, so WF was happy with us. We lock in our rate and hand over our pile of documents. They say “you’ve got this much to offer.” So we do. We set a closing date seven weeks out, as the sellers have kids in school and need a little extra time to get ready. WF says “All right!”

Fast forward six weeks. We’re now a week from the closing date. We’ve had the usual, weekly talks with our local WF rep. They need this document, they need that form. But nothing serious. Everything is proceeding normally.

Six days before closing, our local rep says “I’m a little worried. Your file is in underwriting and they take 24-48 hours to do this step, 24-48 for this step and 24-48 for this step. That takes us very close to the date. I’ll remind them of your closing date and ask them to hurry.”

Hmmm…

Five days before, local rep: “I’ve told them to hurry, but I haven’t heard back.”

Hmmm…

Four days before, local rep, by e-mail, at 4:55pm: “Still haven’t heard back from Underwriting. I’m going on vacation now, so my boss will help you.”

Oh no, you didn’t! The e-mail while heading out the door trick! You bitch!

Three days before, local rep Supervisor, who was actually a step up in responsiveness from the mousy rep: “I’ve been calling and yelling at Underwriting to move yours to the front, but I haven’t received a response.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me now. We’re three days away. Even using the low end of each “24-48 hour step,” we’re not going to make it. We’re now calling WF multiple times a day, asking, begging, demanding, that they get our loan done by the closing date. Our realtor is doing the same.

T-minus two days: Still no word from Underwriting. Even though Underwriting won’t talk to us or our local branch, the local reps can see movement of the file electronically. It ain’t moving.

T-minus one day to closing: File still hasn’t moved. No one at WF will tell us why or give us any kind of date as to when it could be done. Sellers of our future house are freaking out as they’re already moved out and waiting to close on their new house, which can’t happen until WF finishes the fucking documents for us.
Closing day: nope, it’s not happening. Still no word from Underwriting on why or a new date that it will be done. Just. Nothing.

T-plus one day: we’ve signed an extension on the house offer, but the sellers don’t want to sign it because they’re pissed. I don’t blame them, but now our proverbial ball sack is really hanging out in the wind on this deal.

T-plus two days: we finally talk a phone number out of the local Supervisor for an Underwriting Manager. He’s not supposed to give out the number, but he’s pissed that we’re yelling at him every day instead of Underwriting, so he hands it over. We scream at the Underwriting Manager until he finally tells us, “we’re behind on all loans by about three and a half weeks. We just can’t catch up. We’ll probably have yours done on Friday (five days after the closing date).”

What. The. Fuck.

Now the sellers are beyond pissed, to the point where the whole deal might go under because they may have to rework their loan on the house they’re buying because we’ve gone so far past the closing date.

I expect to be bent over by banks – that’s their motto. But I’ve never seen a more useless bunch of fucking crapweasels than these assholes at Wells Fargo. They could have told us a week ago that it wasn’t going to happen…they could have told us two weeks ago it wasn’t going to happen. Hell, they knew six weeks ago, when we could have picked any fucking closing date we wanted, it wasn’t going to happen, but instead they chose to lie about it every fucking day for the last seven weeks and just let our dreams of owning this house go right out the fucking window.

Fuck Wells Fargo.

Oh, and the first poster who replies “I got my home loan from Wells Fargo and it went great!” gets my size 12 Nike right up their ass. Don’t even go there.

2

Did you run this thread by ivn1188 for Pit-worthiness?

Seriously, I nearly exploded with anger myself, reading about your trouble. I hope you’re able to salvage something out of this. Maybe your Realtors can coordinate and get the sellers to understand whose fault this is.

3

Wells Fargo is the biggest piece of shit ever.

I was screwed by them when I worked there. So rest assured they treat their employees just like all their other customers: like shit.

Hate Wells Fargo, hate them so much.

So sorry to hear about your situation!

4

If this all results in you getting your mortgage through another lender - you’ve dodged a huge bullet. The only worse than getting a Wells Fargo mortgage is dealing with those turkeys for the 30 years they hold the paper. Escrow? Expect that to be fucked every year. Bizarre fees that get put on the mortgage regularly? ditto. You need to watch them like a hawk or else “Water line breakage protection” etc. etc. etc. will show up for a few bucks a month.

I had a Wells Fargo mortgage for 2 years - that was enough. They even tried to assess an early pay off penalty when I moved - twice.

5

Something pretty similar happened to us when we tried to buy on a short sale. We saw multiple closing dates come and go, got the MIA reps, a frustrating month and a half of being ignored, then being told we were held up because the bean counters decided they needed another 50 dollars on our offer to make their nut. Fifty fucking dollars was holding us up. We finally told them to fuck off and bought something that was an estate sale.

Don’t ever try to buy anything on a short sale. The banks don’t see you as human and don’t care how much they’re screwing up your life, and they don’t even see any need to acknowledge your existence for weeks or months on end.

6

That really sucks. We just refinanced with WF, and it also took much longer than it had to, with little responsiveness, but since it was just a refi, it didn’t matter much.

It’s not like the housing market is so hot that they should be behind - except they probably laid off a few too many people.

How about a nice long letter to the CEO and state banking regulators outlining what they did to you and asking for compensation for any expenses you laid out before the closing? Might be interesting to see what they say.

7

I was amazed when we bought our house, and refinanced, that we always seemed to be the first people the title company and bank had ever heard of who got a mortgage.

*Nobody *knew what the fuck they were doing.

8

I second this.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have a mortgage through any one, let alone WF, but I can say that WF is the only bank I will go out of my way to never do business with again.

They fucked me over so hard on a bank account when I was just barely 18 that I will never, ever do business with them again. They can suck it.

9

Thanks for the idea, Diosa and Voyager. We’ve thought about it, and actually the sellers have already approached Wells Fargo to pay for their hotel, food, etc, while they’re waiting for WF to get their act together, so I think we’ll keep an eye on what happens there.

10

We went to WF when we wanted to buy a rental property.

It was approved.

Then, a week later, it was unapproved. Despite us telling them, they suddenly decided they wouldn’t do loans on mobile homes (on its own lot.)

Crap. Call the realtor, cancel the deal.

A week after that…we were asked when we were closing on the property so they could arrange the check to be ready at the closing.

I wrote them a strongly worded e-mail, telling them what they could do with their non-communicative selves, and refuse to deal with them ever again.

11

UGH!!!

We’ve gotten loans from WF before and they’ve been fine - but put away that Nike… we refinanced through them this past winter and it took something like 10 weeks from start to finish. This is compared with previous loans that have taken 3-4 weeks at most. We kept getting the runaround, needing extra documentation, forgetting that we had already provided them with said documentation… being told completely different things by different people

Example: we have a HELOC (home equity line of credit) through our credit union. This requires that the HELOC-holder sign a subordination agreement, which is standard practice.

Now, with the value of our house - even with the value conservatively assessed at XX dollars, our equity is well over 20% - with the primary mortgage, and if we’d spent every dime of the HELOC limit. As the HELOC rate is currently slightly below the fixed mortgage rate, our plan was to use a few thousand of that for the closing costs. I had one document from the loan approval process saying “HELOC balance not to exceed YY dollars”. I emailed our contact and said “it’s currently a tad below that, but we’re planning on using some HELOC funds to pay the closing costs, is that OK”. I got a reply saying that was fine.

The day before they FINALLY said we were to close… our contact was on vacation, someone else was doing the final paperwork, which wouldn’t be available until late the afternoon before closing. I told the person “we really need to know the closing cost so we can get a cashier’s check for the amount”. He said “but your liquidity is ZZ (not nearly enough for closing) so we’re rolling the costs into the loan”. I said “but our plan was to use the HELOC”. He said “But that loan’s credit limit has been set to AA, per the subordination agreement!” (which we hadn’t yet seen).

Oooookay. Dammit.

At that point it was too damn much trouble to start all over with another lender so we just sucked it up and stuck with the new loan amount.

And the credit union never DID change our credit limit… I think… at least their web page still shows the much higher balance. I’m afraid to test it out, however.

Odds of it being worth refinancing any time soon are quite slim, but Wells Fargo will not be on our short list if it ever does happen.

12

You have my deep and sincere sympathy. We just recently changed houses, and I’m still trying to soothe my ulcer. Our biggest problem was our mortgage broker - we had used him two times before, and he was excellent. This time, we seriously thought he had suffered some kind of brain damage since the last time we used him - there is absolutely no excuse for all the balls he dropped on this deal. His bad advice basically cost us $7000 and left us with almost zero cash for a month or two during the proceedings.

So, will you be able to close on this house, or is the deal just dead at this point? If you are out of pocket for any money (like losing your deposit) if it is dead, can you sue the bank for gross incompetence? (Yeah, I know, suing banks sounds like a good way to spend a lot of time and money for little results to me, too, but just maybe…)?

13

I arrived at settlement to discover WF had screwed my loan paperwork. I was moving literally across the street, so my old address (rented) was one digit different from my present address. Some helpful soul decided that couldn’t possibly be the case, and changed my old address to the one prior to the rental house. There was therefore an unexplained gap on my credit record, which caused the loan to have issues. Fortunately my broker sorted it out and the purchase went ahead (though not before there were heavy insurance issues - buying a house on February 29th is problematic for some computers, I was lead to believe)…

14

It’s not dead yet, and since the sellers are already moved out and living in a hotel in a new city, I can’t imagine they’d not want to do that, but…

Since the sellers didn’t sign the extension, there’s really no “deal” on the table right now, so it’s totally up to them. I just hope WF doesn’t piss them off even more and the sellers decide to cancel the deal just because they’re so mad.

15

I would think the sellers are anxious to unload the house. If they cancel the deal, they’ll have to start all over again trying to sell.

I know it’s an aggravation, but I think ultimately they’ll agree to an extension, especially since it was the bank’s foul-up.

16

Damn - I am just starting a WF ReFi right now (grabbing the low 15 year fixed rate while I can).

I will admit, WF has me since they hold my bank, savings, credit card and HELOC already. I just want to be able to log on and see every single penny I have and owe in one place.

We will see how my refi goes - luckily the broker is a personal friend.

17

Oooooh, fuck them! And while we’re at it, add Bank of America to that list. Assmunchers made us go a month past our closing date last year and I STILL seethe over it.

Incompetency seems to be a pre-requisite for working in the mortgage industry. I’m amazed that any loans actually make it through their sordid systems, and I can only hope that it happens to THEM.

18

Oh man, I hear ya. We just re-fied with WF and they were absolutely the worst. I can’t imagine doing a purchase through them - I have no doubt they’d fuck that up hopelessly. I completely blistered them in an online survey they sent us after funding; I’m surprised they didn’t call the loan after what I said in the “other feedback” section.

One good thing though, they’ll almost certainly sell the paper (and who the hell is buying WF paper? I sure wouldn’t) so you won’t have to deal with the worthless fuckers for 30 years.

19

keep your fingers crossed on that one - they still have mine, and since we are remodeling, we can’t refi. (kitchen is all torn up.)

20

They may sell the paper, but they will probably keep the servicing portion won’t they?