Stupid Underwriting Tricks

And they're still strange, and a great laugh until it's happening to you. Our profile is perfect, credit scores above 800, and the loan was DENIED today - at NOON on the on the LAST possible day for loan objection, which has got us in a complete scramble - because the underwriter thinks the house we want to buy is a FARM and they don't fund farms. The sellers and both involved real estate agents are FLOORED. It's not a farm in any way that I would define a working farm, ie something you could make money with, but how do you prove that? How do you even formally DEFINE a farm? It's on 5 acres but zoned residential, in a planned neighborhood of similar homes on about 5 acres each. It's outside the area needed for USDA guarantee, so a USDA loan (you know, the type you get for a FARM) would always have been impossible. It's not schedule F. It has a 15 x 30 foot garden, which is perfectly reasonable for a family to grow their own veggies (which, last I checked, is something that is legal for anyone to do in any yard that has space for it) and a coop for chickens (the CITY we are living in a rural 'burb of allows up to 6 chickens on ANY property in city limits. So if you have a yard ANYWHERE here, even a communal yard like for an apartment complex, if you can get the owner's permission you can have chickens. The sellers have already moved their chickens, but does having chickens make this house a farm? Would it make a house near the downtown a farm too??). And get this - THEIR APPRAISER HADN'T EVEN FINISHED THEIR REPORT, so they were making this decision without all their information from the person THEY hired and that WE have already had to pay $400 for, so we're out that money. This wasn't a rush job on our end - we PRE APPLIED for the loan for this place before we went under contract, over a month ago, and were approved. They've had a copy of our contract with the dates this whole time, so what it looks like from our POV is that they took our appraisal money, sat on our formal application for nearly 2 weeks, got an appraiser at the last minute, and then someone back East had a lobotomy and decided anything over 1/4 acre was a farm because I guess rural subdivisions aren't a thing over there and tried to spout some mysterious regulation about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac that we can't find anywhere. Shouldn't they have decided it was a farm BEFORE getting an appraiser, so we could have had time to get another lender and wouldn't have paid $400 for nothing? And if not, shouldn't they have at least gotten the appraisal in a TIMELY manner and then waited til the appraiser's report was done BEFORE MAKING THE DECISION, because otherwise WHAT THE HECK WAS THE POINT OF GETTING AN APPRAISER IF YOU DON'T EVEN NEED THE REPORT FOR YOUR DECISION??? Now we're at risk of losing the $2k we put down as earnest money. Nearly $2400 in the toilet. I'm livid, not least because I'd been with this credit union LITERALLY my whole life, over 30 years... and over this, they've also made us lose the rate lock we had on the rate that was lowest recently, and that'll cost us hundreds if not thousands in the long term. I will probably change banks, because I just do not care anymore. There's no reason to care, because they clearly don't. We'll try to appeal, if we can, but if we wind up closing with another lender or losing out on the house, I am going to give that bank the worst press possible everywhere and writing to every politician I can, because this is insane. Seriously, can you sue a bank to cover your financial losses and legal costs in a case like this? IMO they have been negligent at almost every turn and we are POWERLESS. How do you prove a house isn't a farm when they don't even have an actual DEFINITION for what a farm is??

my underwriter wants my taxes for THIS year. why? the year hasn't even finished yet. we don't have info and do them in january of NEXT year.