Mortgage question

physicist82 · ‎07-12-2014

EDIT: Since it seems like no one likes to answer long posts here is my question in blue.

Is it typical if I am using a mortgage broker who has already pulled credit and given us scores and an over the phone breakdown of what our payment would be to rate compare and apply for another lender online like Chase or Cap1? He has not given us a Good Faith Estimate yet, just the breakdown of our payment. If you need more details to answer the question then you can read the backstory below. THanks!

We are under contract on a house. We have been working with a mortgage broker that never quite gets things done in a timely manner. That being said he is also a coworker of my SO and our insurance agent.

We are pre-approved for our house and he has given us the breakdown of mortgage insurance, taxes, etc, etc. Our midscore that he pulled is 703 TU. EQ is 727 and when he pulled it TU still had a bankruptcy on it that was supposed to drop off 7/2014. We called TU and they removed it. We signed up for credit karma the next day and it did not show up on there anymore. He said if it was removed he could run the credit again and if TU went above 720 like EQ did when it dropped off EQ then we could get 4.5 instead of 4.625. To be absolutely sure we went on TU's website and signed up for their monitoring trial for $1 and it didn't show up there either. We told him and the next day he said he ran our credit again and it was the same.

Is it possible since there was only a couple of days between the pulls that his company only pulled a soft copy which kept the same score as before? Or is he completely lying to us? I asked him yesterday if he was sure it didn't just do a soft pull and he said they even charged for it. We have not gotten an alert on CK, Transunion, or Capital One saying that a new inquiry was made. There is no evidence on our reports that he requested it again.

I know that a mortgage broker checks with multiple lenders for the best offer, but it kind of bothers us only getting information from one person. We are the type that gets our own approval through our CU for a car before going into the dealership so that we can negotiate a rate.

Should we check with a lender like Chase or Capital One (I checked the costs with our CU the other day and the closing costs would be way higher with them) or Quicken to see what our rate can be, even if it is just to give our broker to take his lenders to try and get the rate matched or beat, or do we just trust our broker to do it.

By the way its a conventional loan with 5 down so we have to have mortgage insurance. He said the cost with conventional for it is up front and originally he said it would be 4500 and then the next day he said that its based on credit and it is really 6200. This means that if the credit score didn't get updated when he pulled our credit that not only could we be losing out on the $20/mon savings on the different rates but we get hit with an extra $20/mon because of the mortgage insurance change.

Any help to make any of this clear would be greatly appreciated. Sorry if it is too long. Thanks

Anonymous · ‎07-12-2014

@physicist82 wrote:
We have been working with a mortgage broker that never quite gets things done in a timely manner. That being said he is also a coworker of my SO and our insurance agent.

If it were me I'd shop it around I do not tolerate people that don't complete transactions on time! Time is money!

physicist82 · ‎07-12-2014

@Anonymous wrote:
@physicist82 wrote:
We have been working with a mortgage broker that never quite gets things done in a timely manner. That being said he is also a coworker of my SO and our insurance agent.

If it were me I'd shop it around I do not tolerate people that don't complete transactions on time! Time is money!

But is there a standard of amount of work that has been done so far before you leave a mortgage broker. The first time he ran our credit was in November. Then he was just waiting for us to get our down payment and find a realtor and a house. (Of course if he had told us we could use a 401k loan for the down payment back then we would probably have found something months ago). When he ran our credit again in May because we found a new realtor (our previous one was horrible) and found out that we only had a few months left in our rental, a med collection we didn't know about popped up that dropped our scores too low. He gave us a letter and a copy of that page of the credit report that we could send to the bureaus to dispute it. We sent them and EQ and TU dropped them and EX dropped all but 1. During this time I paid some things off and when all was said and done our scores went up high enough for conventional to be worth it so we wouldn't have the monthly mortgage ins. Neither in Nov nor in May did he give us anything that could raise our credit score with the rapid rescore. Our report would say the potential points that it would raise but he said that it never really gives any info on how to really fix it. (We know that it does because the lender that is a partner with our realtor told us that it would and to ask our broker to do it). This last time when we asked him to pull it it took him a few days before he got around to it and then when he told us our scores and everything he said he would give us a break down of numbers the next Mon. Mon night the sellers accepted our offer so we called and left a message and said hey are our numbers ready. Way later the next day after our agent called him and we called him he finally gave us numbers. So since Tues we have been waiting for him to get the paperwork so that we can sign it. Our due diligence ends 2 Mon from now and our financing deadline is the Mon after that. When we ask him for something it takes days. He DOES work overnight at the same company my SO works for, but still if you are going to be in that business you should at least get things done within 24hrs right? He was supposed to give me a letter for the 401k loan paperwork a week ago, and he just sent it yesterday. We told him that we agreed with conventional on Tues instead of FHA and even today there is still no paperwork for us to sign, on top of the fear that our credit score is actually better but the company only made a soft pull, but I don't know how that works in the mortgage business. I guess I am done ranting now. Sigh!

ezdriver · ‎07-13-2014

You have the right to shop around as much as you desire. You have no binding contract with a mortgage originator be they a broker, banker, bank, or whatever. You do what you feel is in your best interest.

physicist82 · ‎07-13-2014

@ezdriver wrote:
You have the right to shop around as much as you desire. You have no binding contract with a mortgage originator be they a broker, banker, bank, or whatever. You do what you feel is in your best interest.

Even if that broker has supposedly done a lot for us? If we go with someone else should we pay him something for his time because if that happened we had intended to. I know credit report pulls cost money at the very least.

Is it possible that if he pulled our credit a 2nd time within 1 week that it was a soft pull and didn't update our score, or is that unlikely and he lied to us about the 2nd pull?

ezdriver · ‎07-13-2014

I commented based on my personal knowledge and experience having been a mortgage broker in the past. No one in that business gets paid until a transaction is closed. If you fee guilty about abandoning the LO and want to pay the LO that's your choice.

If anyone pulled your credit, they should be giving you a copy of that credit report ... at least that's what I did for all of my customers. Mortgage originators don't do "soft pulls" of credit.

physicist82 · ‎07-13-2014

@ezdriver wrote:
I commented based on my personal knowledge and experience having been a mortgage broker in the past. No one in that business gets paid until a transaction is closed. If you fee guilty about abandoning the LO and want to pay the LO that's your choice.

If anyone pulled your credit, they should be giving you a copy of that credit report ... at least that's what I did for all of my customers. Mortgage originators don't do "soft pulls" of credit.

He gave us the report for the first pull, but he didn't give us 1 for the "second pull" he said everything was the same and the scores were the same but we never got an inquiry on our reports for there being another pull. (when he pulled it the first time Cap1 told us the next day)

On top of the potential that he lied to us about pulling it a 2nd time since we didn't get an inquiry, we are getting nervous because we are a week into our 30 days for closing and we are still waiting on loan paperwork to sign. He says corporate has to print all the brokers paperwork for them because they are still training on the new system. He pulled our credit on the 3rd, wasn't able to give us payment numbers until the 8th, supposedly repulled our credit that day, told us the next day nothing changed and we have been waiting on our paperwork ever since. He also told us the next day that our MI was going to be higher than he originally estimated by 2000 and he has consistently underestimated our annual taxes even though we have told him multiple times what the annual taxes are for that property. Not to mention that there isn't a single house in our side of the county that has less than 1500/yr taxes and he keeps estimating 1000.

StartingOver10 · ‎07-13-2014

Look for someone else to finance your deal right away. If he is a week into this and you don't have 'loan paperwork' yet, that is a real red flag.

You can run simultaneously for a while but if I were you I would be looking for another lender right now.

physicist82 · ‎07-13-2014

@StartingOver10 wrote:
Look for someone else to finance your deal right away. If he is a week into this and you don't have 'loan paperwork' yet, that is a real red flag.
You can run simultaneously for a while but if I were you I would be looking for another lender right now.

So not having our paperwork yet is a big deal...I knew it. Our financing/appraiser deadline is July 28. Our due diligence deadline is the 21st and we have already had our inspection on our side. He hasn't scheduled an appraiser yet because he said he had to have the final signed contract with the sellers signature on it and then have us sign his paperwork before he could order it.

It's not like this is an all of the sudden thing either. We put the offer in for this house on June 18 and gave him all that paperwork when the sellers signed it then, but its a short sale and we had to wait for the bank to approve the price and that happened on the 7th.

StartingOver10 · ‎07-13-2014

@physicist82 wrote:
@StartingOver10 wrote:
Look for someone else to finance your deal right away. If he is a week into this and you don't have 'loan paperwork' yet, that is a real red flag.
You can run simultaneously for a while but if I were you I would be looking for another lender right now.
So not having our paperwork yet is a big deal...I knew it. Our financing/appraiser deadline is July 28. Our due diligence deadline is the 21st and we have already had our inspection on our side. He hasn't scheduled an appraiser yet because he said he had to have the final signed contract with the sellers signature on it and then have us sign his paperwork before he could order it.

It's not like this is an all of the sudden thing either. We put the offer in for this house on June 18 and gave him all that paperwork when the sellers signed it then, but its a short sale and we had to wait for the bank to approve the price and that happened on the 7th.

I didn't know it was a short sale. The financing is usually started when you get the official letter from the short sale lender approving your purchase. You supply that letter along with the executed contract to your lender and they process the loan. Most short sale lenders only allow 30 days to close it, unless you are getting an FHA loan, then they routinely allow 45 days.

Do you have the official letter from the short sale lender yet? If so, that is what your lender needs to get the paperwork rolling.

BTW, normally the appraisal is ordered immediately when the application is turned in - at least with the lenders I use.