1st, let me say that I have NEVER posted a single review on the web before. I am soooo unhappy with this company, that I felt compelled to warn others of their incompetence. If I could give zero stars, I would. I recently refinanced with Residential Finance Corp (Columbus, Ohio). This mortgage broker is completely incompetent with a string of departments/processes that do not communicate with each other and that ALL constantly miss deadlines. Reasons I am unhappy:
1) When I first approached RFC, I was assured we could get through refinancing within 30 days...it ended up taking 2 months.
2) In requesting a title search by email, they mis-spelled my lawyer's email address--they allowed the request for title to go unanswered for 2 WHOLE WEEKS before finally emailing me to say they weren't getting a response from my lawyer. They NEVER even bothered to PICK UP A PHONE. This was the first significant delay that pushed back our settlement date. By the way, during this 2 week delay, I was calling every 3 days to try and find out what was going on because I thought it was weird I wasn't hearing anything in regard to actually scheduling settlement...RFC would just never respond to my inquiries or follow up.
3) The loan application gets reviewed by Underwriting on at least 3 different parts of the process. Though Robert Huether told us each of those reviews should take 24 hours, they took 3-5 days each. This led to another significant delay in our closing.
4) We had to schedule settlement twice because of delays on RFC's end. The first day we were scheduled to settle at 4pm on a Friday. I was assured at several points earlier in the week we would be all set to move forward. Though me and my laywer were promised paperwork by Friday morning, we heard absolutely nothing and could not get anyone on the phone after noon that day. Only at 6pm--remember, we were scheduled to close at 4pm--did we receive an email from Robert saying we were through approval. Of course this meant a significant delay in our settlement and additional expenses incurred by us.
5) After our appraisal came in, we agreed on a final loan amount for the refinance that would leave us with 80%LTV. I received several emails from both the loan officer Victoria Palella and the processor Robert Huether confirming the amount our loan was to be for. Only a day prior to the final settlement did I come to find out that apparently they should have had us resign our disclosure documents confirming the final loan amount (instead of the estimated loan amount we started off the process with because we weren't sure where our house would appraise). This resulted in us having to bring more than twice the money to settlement that we were expecting to bring. In all fairness, they did offer to have us resign the doc at the time we discovered the error?but then we would have had to delay settlement yet another 4 days (and this was after we already had to delay 1 week past our first scheduled date, which was already delayed 2 weeks past what it should have been).
5) They almost did not release funds after settlement because they were ignorant of the laws in my state that allow lawyers to act as notaries.
6) They almost did not release funds after settlement because some other department disagreed with one of their other departments about a $37 charge on the HUD.
7) When they finally did wire the funds, they only wired 99.5% of the money. We had to wait another ? day for the remaining .5%
8) All the additional work my lawyer had to do to deal with their competence through this whole process = 4K worth of services!!!!
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