Quote from @Peter Tomeczko:
@Jay Hinrichs
Here is a quick outline.
They said they did loans as low as $75k and the house needed to appraise for a minimum of $100k.
Based on comps and recent sales I know the property is worth 120-140ish.
They asked for $2,500.00 as their fee up front. Btw total fees would have been around 9k if the loan was ever created at 8% fixed for 30 years. Which I was ok with.
The appraisal came back at $110k which still fits in their guidelines. Then the underwriter started with all these crazy demands of changing LLC stuff which we did. Changing our insurance. Which we did. Fixing some things on the property. Which we did. And back and forth and back and forth for almost two months.
Then we get everything done they asked for waiting on next step I get a call saying. We have some bad news. We changed our metrics on lending and wont loan on that low of a property because we have new higher ups and we no longer will approve your loan. You can continue the process but it will be denied. I was upset but knew there was a chance it could not happen. I said. Ok. Well. Can i get a refund of the $2,500.00 I sent you. I know there are fees you paid like title, inspections and what not so minus those fees which were around $1,000.00. Send us our $1,500.00 back. (In their contract there is a non refundable $1,000.00s). We knew we were not going to get that back. So they owe use $1,500.00 right. Nope. They have a fee for keeping their lights on. So now they will only return $1,000.00. We did some searching and found they do this to lots of people. Move the goal line right at the end. Hit them with fees and return very little of their money.
So now they have had $2,500.00 of our money. Making them money for months. The property we were going to buy with the refi sold. See ya 9 unit. And they know this low amount of money lawyers wont go after so it’s either we take the loss and it is what it is or we fight them about it.
We are speaking with a realestate law firm to see what we can do. If we get other people who they screwed together there could be a bigger case. So at this point I guess stealing $500.00 to keep their lights on is worth all the negative comments and reviews. We have spoken to a few other investors they have done this to but they hide/block all negative comments on social media. Their Facebook account reviews are bought. Just read them. You will see the real ones. The real ones are 50% good to bad. The fake ones are about making 10k on bit coin???
I’m not sure what we will do at this point. Its not a huge loss it’s just annoying and they are stealing peoples money. I may be out $1,500.00 but I don’t want other people to be annoyed/lose their hard earned money like us. Do not trust them. Dig into their “real reviews”. They may have completed other peoples loans fine but this has been our experience with them unfortunately. I really thought we found a good company to work with but I guess it’s back to the drawing board $1,500.00 down and it’s my own fault for not digging into a company more before sending money. If it seems too good to be true, it most likely is.
@Peter Tomeczko
Thank you for this write up, however we already closed on our deal with them a month ago. I will say that their policies were quite annoying, but ultimately the deal did end up going through.
For example, they don't do same day funding on closing day. You have to request it and get it approved, and even then they only fund twice a day. Luckily we were able to get approved for same day funding and the sellers got their money later that day.
Another complaint we had was the slowness of their underwriting team. We almost didn't get the CTC on time. My team and our realtor had to be on them constantly in the week of settlement to get the CTC.
They also made silly mistakes like using one of the business partner's home address than the registered business address to send mail to.
Would I use them again? Probably not. Would I use them if they were one of the last options? Maybe.
But with us being so new to the real estate game, I'm glad we were able to learn the lessons we did early on and are able to ask them going forward to any lenders we speak with for future deals.
