Does Your Lender Make a Difference?

When a new buyer chooses a lender, what is their choice based on? Interest rate?, the trust of a referral?, who has the prettiest sign? Often it's who seems to have the cheapest interest rate. What a mistake!

Consider Captain Sulley. He looked like everyone else who flew. He always landed those planes, so it's hard to say how good he was. But when disaster hit, he was able to pull off the miraculous, and land a giant engineless jet in the cold frigid waters of the Hudson River. He used his years and years of experience, training, drills, and lessons learned from the inevitable mishaps he must have faced before to pull it off.

Your lender is the same. They all seem comparable... until disaster strikes. And when it does, you want experience on your side. A few months ago I sold a home in a great neighborhood of Citrus Heights, located 1/4 mile from a very seedy street (one of our areas worst). Any local appraiser would have understood to not use comps from the seedy street, as it was insulated from my buyer's home by geographical factors. But as the crow flies, it's another story. Our appraisal came in fine... actually above our price. It was the desk review that shot us down. It came in $60K low! Why, because the out-of-area underwriter used a zillow-like process to estimate the value... which included sales within a bull-eye radius. And that meant our seedy street became our comparable.

But my lender has been doing this for over 30 years, and understands the ins and outs of lending like the back of her hand. She whipped into action, and got the loan through. Did she use magic?, coercion?, bribery?... no. She used her experience to know which of the many paths to take to make it work. She could have gone a number of different directions, but she knew exactly the turns to make at each fork in the road, as she led our transaction down the path to a closed escrow.

So don't just pick the lender with the cheapest quote. It could mean the difference between getting your home or not. Always go with experience. Don't know who to call?
CALL ME... I GOT PEOPLE!

flickr Photo by mpflies2 & theevilmightyf