Home Closing Costs Not Disclosed to Homebuyer, Who's To Blame

QUESTION: A couple purchased a home in Florida this past April. Last weekend they received a letter and an invoice from the law office that acted as the parties’ closing agent, informing them they owed additional fees due to “additional endorsements requested by the lender after the closing.”

Wouldn this be the bank's responsibility to pay, since they did not ask for all endorsements at the closing time?

A: When you closed on your purchase, your lender gave you certain government-required disclosures relating to your loan. One of these disclosures was a good faith disclosure of fees for your closing.

At your closing, the bank was required to give you a final disclosure of all fees for your purchase. If the disclosures included these fees, but you somehow failed to pay them, you would be obligated to pay them now. However, if the lender failed to disclose these fees, the lender may be out of luck and may not be able to come back to you to request these fees.

Now, it’s possible that the closing agent received instructions from the lender to include these fees and the closing agent failed to include the fees on the documents delivered to you.

However, the closing agent may have been acting on behalf of the lender and the closing agent’s mistake may require the closing agent to resolve it after closing. Your closing statement would change if you pay those additional fees and your lender would be required to issue you new closing documents relating to those fees.

If it’s true that the lender failed to disclose these fees to you and now wants these endorsements, those fees might need to be paid by the lender and not you. If you had known of these fees, you might have chosen a different lender. The purpose of these disclosures is to make the system more transparent and assist buyers in choosing a lender.

(Unfortunately, the new law has improved some things but has made the process of reviewing title company charges and fees more difficult in many situations.)

Have you ever failed to inform a client of the entiriety of their closing costs?

For the full blog with more legal information and background behind this type of situation read it here: http://www.thinkglink.com/article/2010/08/27/home-closing-costs-not-disclosed-to-homebuyer