I just recently closed a deal where the "buyer's lender" denied the loan at the last minute and we had to scramble to get new financing. When the offer was accepted my buyer had a loan officer with a big bank that assured him it was a slam dunk getting it funded. I offered to have my buyer speak with a mortgage broker I work with, but they declined. The big bank ended up denying the loan 3 days before escrow was to close and almost killed the deal. What made it worse is that the sellers were going through a nasty divorce and the home was in pre-foresclosure status so we had 3 attorneys on the seller side to deal with which complicated an already fraught process.
Luckily the seller's agent was cooperative in calming his side down as I frantically worked to get other financing. I got the file to my mortgage broker who got it approved in a week and funded the next week. My lesson from this is that I should have got my mortgage broker involved right when the big bank did the first delay. My client is commission only and they asked to have his mother added to the loan to help the debt to income ratio as they averaged out his income over 2 years. Since his mother was moving in with them, due to age related issues, that was easy to do. However, I should have acted right then and there to have the mortgage broker start working because a week later the big bank said that my client needed a years worth of cash in the bank, which he did not have. The mortgage broker did not require this and even notice that the big bank made a mistake in calculating the debt to income ratio and the mother did not even need to be added.
So lesson to me, when dealing with a big bank have a good alternative in your pocket and act fast instead of waiting and trusting the big bank loan officer as his underwriters are the ones in charge. The silly thing is I bet that the big bank will buy back the loan on the secondary market sometime in the future.
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