On May 20 we entered into a 60-day rate lock agreement with Central Mortgage Company of Arkansas, a branch of Arvest Bank, to refinance our ARM held by them, to a 30-year fixed rate of 4.875%. Prior to committing to the 60-day lock, we asked our rep, Jacob, if a 90-day lock would make more sense and he assured us that 60 would be sufficient. On that same day, Central received a complete application and file from us via FedEx.
We received the rate lock agreement from Central via email on May 29th following my wife's request. On June 4th, Central told us that we had conditional approval and requested further documentation, which we submitted via fax on June 6th and confirmed receipt on June 8th.
On June 22nd, Central received our appraisal from their appraisal company. At this point, we still had 23 days remaining to close on our loan. Like many homes in Florida, ours appraised under our original value. Central informed us that they needed to get a subordination agreement from the holder of our second mortgage. We provided Central with the information needed to contact Mercantile Bank, the bank that holds our second. Rather than wait for Central to do so, I contacted Mercantile and was asked by them to provide the appraisal and loan approval. We received these items from Central on June 23rd and submitted them to the Mercantile. This is the first of many steps that we took rather than wait for Central to do so.
On June 25th, Mercantile informed us of the conditions that we had to meet in order for them to subordinate. We passed this information onto Central and received the following response, Sorry to have not gotten back sooner, there's fires everywhere! Did Mercantile have a specific requirement or level they would have to be paid down to? I will call you tomorrow to discuss, again sorry for the delay.
On June 29thh, we negotiated a buy down and made the corresponding payment on our second mortgage, which Mercantile agreed would be sufficient to subordinate. We passed this information onto Central on June 30th.
On July 2nd, we asked if the holder of the second had given Central everything they needed and were told I am working on getting a subordination agreement from the Title Co. We still had 13 days to close and did not anticipate any problems. Our rep from Central told us this was in fact the case.
On July 6th, we were told Thanks Mr. Anderson... I've been in touch with the title company again requesting they send an agreement to Bobby. It hasn't happened yet, but it's at the top of my list. During this week, Central had very little contact with us and presented no sense of urgency.
On July 13th our rep contacted us asking for additional documentation. We provided it that day. He also said that his wife was going to deliver the following day, but did not provide us with anyone who would be picking up his account. On July 14th I called and spoke with a woman who had no idea, based on Jacob's notes on our account, that we were refinancing with them. She eventually steered me to his supervisor, who requested additional documentation from the bank which held our second mortgage. At this point it was obviously too late to close by the 15th, and yet Jacob left us, his customer, with no back up contact and no update on our loan or closing details. It was quite obvious that he had no intention of trying to get us to close that week even though he knew our rate lock was going to expire.in spite of this, during the last week and until June 20th we worked feverishly to ensure that they had all the documentation necessary.
I cannot help but wonder how many other people this has happened to. We bent over backwards to get Central everything they needed, in a very timely fashion. Each step of the way we offered to do whatever was necessary to assist them and in many instances did just that. Today, July 21st they informed us that our lock was gone, and that it would cost $10,400 to get that rate back. There is no reason this loan could not have been done in a timely fashion. Both of our credit scores are above 780. It is our feeling that Central Mortgage, through inexperience, negligence, greed or just plain dragging their feet, allowed our rate lock to expire when there was no reason that this loan could not have been done in a timely fashion. We spent thousands of dollars to buy down our second, and now have nothing to show for it. Has this happened to anyone else?
John
Sanford, Florida
U.S.A.
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