Throughout a previous series of months, Chase has had the chance offered by U.S. President Barack Obama’s Making Homes Affordable Program for them to remortgage a great number of home loans. Even though not all homeowners will be approved for refinancing or loan modification at the time they asking for a mortgage loan with a lower rate, most people are still able to find many choices available for desperate borrowers.
Bad Experiences With Chase
If you intend to apply for a loan from Chase, you may wish to read other people’s stories who have experience with Chase. I found that most people are rather having unpleasant experiences with Chase, and therefore, you may want to find out more about them before engaging with their mortgage loan.
First Case
The first complaint is from a Texas borrower. She got a home equity loan with Chase not long ago. She has a lot of equity over and above the home equity loan. She always pays her home equity loan by the due date (and on most occasions is just right before the due date) over many years. Then, there is one month that she has made a late payment due to forgetting to mail it.
Because of this, suddenly, she found her credit line was frozen. She then called Chase for the issue, and after a few transfers, she was finally answered by a staff member from the credit department. Even though she has always made the payment before the due date over many years, Chase said that she has made a lot of payments late repeatedly for recent months. When she argued with them, Chase required her to prove to them for the last 12 months of her on-time payments.
No matter how, she managed to prove at last, Chase has effectively deprived her of her credit line for a year. She possesses close to perfect credit, and they were more than protected with the substantial equity in her home, with no other mortgage but that one. She got extremely disappointed and she immediately refinanced her home equity loan with another loan company, and she said she will never go for Chase again.
The time she looked for refinancing, she immediately had several banks line up to offer her their services. Therefore, her advice is that you need to watch out for Chase as they consider payments made close to the due date as payments that are treated as month late payments.
Second Case
The second one is from Florida, who found that Chase is rather horrible. He is trying to get a fixed-rate mortgage with them. She has an excellent credit score with more than 700 in 2011, has a high income, and gave 20% as a down payment.
At first, he thought that he was going to have his loan approved without any problem due to his healthy credit score. But later he found out that he was wrong. Chase keeps asking for more and more paperwork to be done by him. And every time he sent them some documents, he would expect Chase people to spend 1 to 2 weeks to even look at them!
And most of the time, they end up asking for even more documents. What is more ridiculous is that after 2 months of many documents being sent, they may come back to you and request new versions of the documents he has sent, and the reason given is that those documents are too old!
Besides, he claimed that the loan officer who contacted him was very unprofessional. When he asked that loan officer for the reason why it takes so long for the application, the answer that he received was that this is the rule of Chase. The officer even further informed him that if he doesn’t like the way they do it, he can just go to other banks! The officer then hung up the phone. So, he said that he will not deal with Chase anymore and will never recommend Chase to anyone.
Third Case
The third one is from Georgia. She claimed that Chase charged her $395 for an application fee for her to be eligible for a mortgage loan in which they said were the charges for the procedure to be carried out by their underwriters and loan officers.
She is not happy with the charges and had argued with the Chase officer about the fee. She claimed that Chase had been paid them for salary, and they shouldn’t make any further charges for the application. The reply from them is that this fee is incurred to prevent people who only intend to get a pre-approval letter and shop around. And later, they can change their words and claim that the fee is used to pay for the appraisal work that was done. Who knows which one is true?
Her advice is also the same as you’d better not go with Chase unless you want to lose the home that you want to buy. She ended up getting rejected by Chase for the mortgage loan after they approved a previous home that she had opened escrow on. The reason given by Chase is that during the one month when she opened escrow on her next home, the rules of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had changed.
My Thoughts on Chase
Due to the above three serious complaints, I think Chase needs to look into it seriously on whether the case is true and what rectification is that need to take. Otherwise, they may go out of business very soon, as the mortgage loan is a very competitive business. There are new programs that Chase must make available that help eligible homeowners who cannot work out a Chase Mortgage Modification, for whatever reason.
Short sales and deed-in-lieu of foreclosure arrangements are set up to relieve the homeowner of future obligations resulting from the mortgage. There are even funds to assist with moving expenses necessary for obtaining more affordable housing.
Read also: An Introduction to Mortgage Pre-Approval