Big question: What is the most important thing to consider when choosing a real estate mortgage lender?
Is it rates? Fees? Whether or not they can do a digital mortgage? How do you decide?
J.D. Power and Associates just completed a survey of over 5,200 borrowers from the last year – those that either obtained a loan to buy a home or had refinanced an existing mortgage. They wanted to find out what was the most important item.
The answer: responsiveness.
Borrowers most wanted their representative to get back to them!
The categories for rating were at 7 days, 5 days, 3 days, and 1 day. Seriously: some lenders took a week to respond back to the homeowner. And, even worse, 24 hour response was considered exceptional.
Imagine this: you’re in escrow on a home, have an issue, and it takes the lender a day to respond?
My head would explode. So should yours.
Unless the circumstances are extraordinary, you should expect your lender to get back to you RIGHT AWAY.
Advice: When shopping for a mortgage lender, test them: leave them a text, email, or voicemail and then just wait to see how long it takes to get back to you. If it’s not IMMEDIATE, especially right upfront, it’s time to MOVE ON.
Transcript:
Well, hi there, I’m Michael Hausam of the Hausam Group at Vista Pacific Realty.
So a question that comes up all the time is what is the single most important thing to consider when choosing a real estate mortgage lender? Is it convenience? Do they have a digital mortgage? Do they have an app on the phone that you can do everything with? What is it?
Well, helpfully JD Power and Associates just did a survey of almost 6,000 different barrowers that have all either refinanced or purchased a home in the last 12 months and here’s what they came up with.
This was actually surprising to me.
I’ve printed this out in big print so I can read it.
The number one thing that customers want is a quick response. That’s it. They simply want somebody to get back to them in a timely manner.
Now what’s really interesting about this, here on this chart, this is the results – they have all the big mortgage lenders – many of whom you’ve heard of.
Some of whom you may actually have a checking account with; in fact in one case your favorite sports team might play in an arena with their name on it.
Now the categories that they have set up are also interesting to me. They have 7 days or less, 5 days or less, 3 days or less. In the top category the number one category is 1 day or less.
So if a mortgage lender got back to borrower within 24 hours that’s as good as they could do.
Well I have to tell you if the bar is set as low as 24 hours for a response, if it were me in the middle of a transaction, I would be absolutely furious. 24 minutes, something like that that’s what I’m gonna want.
I couldn’t even imagine if I’m in escrow with somebody and I tried to get a hold of the lender for something and it takes them 36 hours to get back to me and he says, “hey that’s good enough to be in second place!”
My head would explode. And yours should too, quite frankly.
So, how do you deal with that? What do you do?
Of course everybody that you talk to, they’re gonna say “Oh I’ve got an email address, I’ve got a snapchat, you can text me, and I’ll get back to you right away…” So how do you figure that out?
Well, quite simply what you’re gonna do is test them if there’s a particular mortgage lender that you want to potentially shop and work with; send them a text, send them an email, leave them a voice mail and then…click click click click click…watch you watch and if it takes them more than just a short little bit of time to get back to you, they’ve just eliminated themselves from the competition. Easy peasy. ‘
Now of course, I as a licensed real estate broker, I can handle all of the requests and needs that you might have, and I promise you, its never gonna be a, “hey I got back to you in 24 hours, aren’t I great?” It’s gonna be right away.
So if you’ve got more questions or you’d like to talk to me further there’s a little link that’s going to appear right above my bald head in just a second or, here on the site there’s many other ways to get a hold of me, as well. Thank you very much and have a great day.