Internet and Hometown Lenders

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Shop both internet and local internet mortgage lenders before you decide where you would like to make your new loan application. Mortgages are commodities these days so you can be fairly ruthless in your quest for the best combination of rates, points and terms. What you would want from a lender is businesslike efficiency and good rates. Always keep in mind that even if you work with a local lender you may end up handling part of the process over the internet. In refinancing a mortgage for example, a local lender would ask you to fill out an application online, make you answer a few questions over the phone and then follow up with one face-to-face meeting to supply documents.

Start your search broadly. If you belong to a credit union then by all means check out their mortgage offerings. They often have better deals than you can get elsewhere. Also check the loans and rates offered by the bank that handles your checking account because they might offer a slight break to current customers. Take a look also at the offerings of one or two other local lenders. Search online as well and take a look at loans offered by some of the big online lenders such as www.eloan.com. Don’t get sentimental about the idea of doing business with a hometown bank or with the idea of keeping all your business at one institution because the odds are high that shortly after you close on the loan, the loan itself will be sold off to another company and the right to service the loan – that is collect your payments, manage your escrow account and otherwise take care of your needs will be sold off to yet a different company. You will have no say in the matter.

J.D Power and Associates which is a market research company best known for its surveys of consumer satisfactions with automobiles, releases a survey of consumer satisfaction with mortgage companies every November. Go to www.jdpower.com to find the latest mortgage surveys along with many others related to personal finance. While they don’t survey mortgage lenders’ competitiveness with interest rates they do ask about how happy consumers were with the service they received during the loan application process and after closing. It is worth your while to check out the latest version of the survey if only to spot which companies rank significantly below average in consumer satisfaction.

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