Why the right lender and loan agent are important.
I'm sure buyers often wonder why we agents have our favorite loan agents. After all, aren't all loan agents—and all lenders, for that matter—the same? Aren't the only differences the name on the building (or Web site) and the interest rate?
Consider the following email, sent a few days ago to all the local Coldwell Banker offices by a disgruntled CB agent:
Dear Colleagues,
I’ve just had the worst possible lending experience, and I thought I’d warn others before they’re caught by the same situation.
My clients bypassed my recommendations and chose to work with [name deleted to protect the guilty] with US Bank in San Carlos.
At every turn this person let the buyers down. Their appraisal wasn’t ordered until 10 days after the contract was ratified, the appraiser was sent the wrong contract, the buyers were sent documents with incorrect loan and insurance amounts on them, the loan docs were not ordered and didn’t arrive until the scheduled day of COE. His cell phone voicemail was full for the whole transaction, and he never once answered his office phone. Almost every email was answered by an out-of-office notification. When we did get responses, his contempt for both the listing agent and I, as well as the client were clearly noticeable…one word answers, nasty answers or no answers at all.
In the end he blamed the delays on his processing team and refused to take responsibility himself.
The clients are writing a formal complaint revolving around the lack of communication, incorrect information and general mishandling. My complaint is with the complete lack of respect for the contract, the buyers and the agents involved.
Feel free to call me if you want any more details – suffice to say however, that this experience was awful! Just awful.
Not coincidentally, about a month ago one of my buyers had what I'm sure he'd call an "awful" experience with a loan agent at a nearby branch of the same bank. As often happens in real estate, we were writing an offer on a week-end and needed a pre-approval letter from his loan agent. And as often—but not always—happens, the loan agent wasn't returning calls that week-end or, for all I know, any week-end. Which is like a real estate agent not returning calls over a week-end, the busiest two days in the real estate week. Working week-ends goes with the territory, folks. If your idea of the perfect week-end is sitting around in your underwear watching sports programming or, heaven forbid, giving your family, garden or dog your undivided attention, then don't get into the real estate or loan business.
So no return call from the loan agent over the week-end, and no return call Monday morning, and then it gets to be early afternoon and no return call, so my client calls her. No, she says, she doesn't check her voicemail over the week-end. And when she gets to work this morning she has so many messages she doesn't have time to return his. And if he doesn't like it, he can find himself another lender.
Now, my client has been banking with this bank for years, and I can hear the shock in his voice when he calls to tell me the "preferred customer" treatment he's gotten. He fires off an email to the bank's management and gets an apologetic response. They mollify him by transferring him to their "top producer", someone out of their San Francisco office, satisfaction guaranteed. I call her asking for a pre-approval letter. She never calls back, but she does fax—and no one has faxed pre-approvals since maybe 1952, they email them—a pre-approval to my office. Without telling me. And since she or her assistant doesn't put my last name on the fax's cover sheet, it takes a while for our receptionist to figure out which John the letter is for.
My client has had enough, and calls the loan agent I recommended some time ago. I call her too, asking how any major bank's customer service can be not just this bad but this consistently bad. And while that probably sounds like a naive question—at least a few of you are silently replying "because it's a major bank"—the lending industry is intensely competitive, and loan agents are a dime a dozen and there a lot fewer than there used to be, and competitive industries and professions compete on service as well as price. And unless your price is rock bottom, and even if it is, you'd better darn well be offering at least adequate service and then some. You'd better darn well be adding value to the transaction or subtracting yourself from the equation (the title of my next best-seller). My loan agent speculates that US Bank is doing so much refinancing right now that its agents have more business than they know what to do with.
So if a real estate agent recommends a loan agent, it's because the latter has never done the above to the former. And that's a good thing for you to know.