Friday, June 13, 2008

Not amused

So although Boyfriend's name will be on the title and mortgage of our new house, I'm pretty much handling everything. He doesn't really have the inclination to gain more knowledge about house hunting and everything that involves, so we've only seen houses I've picked out with the realtor I selected and gone to the mortgage person I contacted. Mortgage Lady seems to not be terribly on the ball though and it may have just cost us several hundred more dollars. Our offer on the house was accepted on Wednesday and our realtor sent her the contract. She called me about 2PM on Thursday to tell me that rates had gone up a little from when we saw her last Saturday (we are getting an FHA loan, and the rate at par then was 6.25%) and that we could choose to pay a half point to get it back to 6.25% or we could take 6.375% without the half point. I asked her to email me the Good Faith Estimates for both scenarios and I would discuss it with Boyfriend and get back to her. I said I would do that and call her in probably about an hour. Then I called Boyfriend and asked him to check my email in half an hour and look at the estimates. By 4:30 I still had no email so I called and left a message. She had apparently left for the day - had not bothered to call me when she didn't hear from me - and I didn't get the estimates until 8:15 this morning. I checked email at 9 after finishing force-feeding one of the guinea pigs who has some bowel issues (she of the multiple tumors) and got the estimates. Boyfriend and I gmail-chatted about them and decided to go for the 6.25% with paying the half point. This scenario wouldn't have cost us the full half point, because part of our offer is that the seller pays $3300 towards closing costs, and it was looking like the costs weren't going to be that much, so the extra would go towards paying for the half point.

So I email her back to say that we'd pay the half point, and she replies saying:

Hi Kira,
Well.......................please don't shoot the messenger. About 1/2 hour
after we talked yesterday, our rates were suspended because the market took
a bad turn for mortgage rates and are still suspended this morning. I will
have new rates around 11:00 then I'll call you as soon as I know we still
have that, ok? Keep your fingers crossed that Friday the 13th will be a
good day and I'll lock you in at a good rate.

Ok, now why exactly didn't she say that when she sent me the estimates at 8:15? When she ALREADY knew that these estimates were no longer valid because she had no idea if we could get the rates or not? (Note: she works for a quasi mortgage broker place, they use internal funds on some loans and then sell all of them off. So I assume she means their internal bank's rates, or something.) I looked on Bankrate and the national average is already up to 6.29%, which means we probably will be quoted 6.5% or worse.

Now if she'd sent the emails on time yesterday, we could have locked in already and not had this rigmarole.. she already had issues sending things to Boyfriend by email because she didn't listen when I spelled it for her and tried to send it to juno.com and not gmail.com. So I'm thinking maybe we need a new mortgage broker.. and it would have to be fast, because the closing is scheduled for July 8th. But also, at this point, the rates have already gone up, and I don't know if anyone else could get us a better rate anyway. Grr.

Oh, and for the wildly curious, our offer was full price minus $3300 in closing costs, for closing July 8th and the tenants moved out by July 15th. They accepted with only minor revisions (the realtor asked for home and gasline warranties to be purchased, but they already have them.) The house has students in it and is owned by one of the students' parents, so they are flexible on the whole tenants-rights issues, although we have always given 24 hour notice and are giving 30 days notice for them to move out, plus allowing a week after closing (in case it doesn't happen.)

Boyfriend is understandably pissed. I would not be surprised if he wants to vote with his feet and we go to someone else.

3 comments:

Revanche said...

Hmph, at this rate I wouldn't be inclined to give her my business even if other brokers couldn't beat the rate, so long as they matched it.

Anonymous said...

My sympathies. Lived in mortgage hell for 9 months including waiting for the call back after rate changes that never comes and the bait and switch quotes. A broker at Chase worked really hard for me but the deal fell through on the other end so I’m now in Real Estate Rehab. But I had a slip last week and looked at property Good luck

Anonymous said...

Buying the home we currently live in back in April of 2007 was one of the worst experiences of my life. I do believe we got the last mortgage in Michigan before credit completely froze, but it was hellish. Reading this post brought it all back. Hang in there. You'll survive, but barely.