After eleven grueling months looking, my wife and I bought a house in Altadena, but there were serious problems with the transaction. First, we had to fire our lender well into the process. Secondly, the selling agent must have been one of the ""Mean Girls"" in high school, and was incompetent to boot. She represented B of A and the Veterans' Administration in the sale, which was an REO. No one on either side of the transaction had ever done a VA foreclosure, and the selling agent repeatedly sent us incorrect information. We had only 19 days to close, and still had not been assigned an escrow company. At that point, my agent was told by the Mean Girl that we could pick our own, and my agent immediately called Premium Escrow.
Lysette was completely responsive to our needs, and handled every curve ball thrown by the idiotic selling agent, B of A and the VA. There was a lot of misinformation presented, and some things had to be done a second time, but none of that was Lysette's fault. Thanks to Lysette and our new lender, we were able to meet a number of ridiculously short deadlines and close on time.
An escrow company is sort of a ""middleman"", and only deals with information it is given. If that information is bad, then things go wrong. In my transaction, my first lender was a flake, and the selling agent was incompetent. Only after Premium Escrow was on the job did we start to feel secure.
Reading some of the negative reviews of this company that literally enabled me to buy my house makes me think that some of those folks who wrote them made their own problems. An office has the right to close when it says it's going to close, just as an airplane has the right to take off on time. And if you're going to enter into something as serious as buying real estate, it pay to know in advance what kind of check will be acceptable.
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