Author Topic: Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas  (Read 1808 times)

bennion.r

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Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas
« on: January 06, 2016, 09:25:35 AM »
I'm preparing to buy a home in Austin Texas. It's a pretty hot market and a lot of homes get sold pretty quickly. The lady who will tentatively be our real estate agent says that offers backed by an online lender will get turned down because the seller will be concerned about the lender dropping the ball. She wants me to only consider local lenders with a good reputation.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I wanted to use an online lender or Penfed to get the lowest rate and lowest closing costs possible. Will sellers really turn down offers over the lender like she says?

Meowmalade

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Re: Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas
« Reply #1 on: January 06, 2016, 09:45:28 AM »
I was shocked at how much paperwork and detailing a paper trail for all income that had to be done for our mortgage four years ago, much more than when I bought a condo in Austin in 2007.  I am not surprised at what your agent said, since it can be challenging to close on time if something comes up and it takes days to get any response from an online lender.

I would check out Austin First Mortgage.  It's basically run by a bunch of Chinese ladies who don't sound very professional over email, but they are on top of things, will respond "after hours", and they had the best rate that I found by far.  Based on my experience when I got my condo, I would not hesitate to recommend them.

bacchi

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Re: Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas
« Reply #2 on: January 10, 2016, 04:26:58 PM »
I'm betting the realtor has some lenders to recommend, right?

I think I did all of the paperwork for a recent re-fi electronically. What couldn't be e-signed required a printer, a scanner/camera, and email.

letired

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Re: Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas
« Reply #3 on: January 10, 2016, 04:30:14 PM »
I worked with Sente Mortgage, and they were fantastic, very very on the ball. As always, compare rates, but when I was calling up folks, a lot of them seemed to be a little flakey. If nothing else, you might be able to use those online quotes for negotiation with a local lender or mortgage broker.

NonprofitER

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Re: Local vs online lenders in Austin Texas
« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2016, 01:06:59 PM »
We bought our ATX home with a local lender ~4 yrs ago - United Lending. They did a good job, especially considering we were 1st time homebuyers and had spent the previous 5 working years overseas (more difficult to prove past income, taxes, etc.).

We refinanced a year and a half later (changed from 30 to 15 year and slightly better interest rate) and United was slow to respond to us with rates, so we used Childress Mortgage Group located in DFW (Frisco). They are a small, family run brokerage and seemed very on top of things, very customer service oriented and eager to move towards closing. No issue with them being outside of Austin. Rates were competitive as big banks at the time.