Thanks, I am still trying to figure out how this works. I live in a small town, so options are not abundant. These are numbers from 1 of 3 local options.
What does shopping around for a loan look like? Do I just go through this process with all the folks in town and see who comes out best? Does that hurt my credit score? If so, does that matter?
Is it worth splitting hairs if one loan is just slightly better than the other vs. just getting on with it and locking in a good rate before they rise?
The way I shopped around was to go to the various lender websites and look at two figures: rate and points. You could also just look at APY if you wanted a single number to look at. It takes one minute to look at a loan this way - no need to "go through a process". Looking at websites does not hurt your credit score.
I always shopped my mortgages pretty hard. A 0.25% interest rate difference over the life of the loan can equate to thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars in my world at that time was a lot of money and worth the effort. How hard did you shop for your last TV and how much did you save doing that? Probably days and maybe a few hundred dollars.
So when would ever be a better time? Interest rates are only going to rise, right? I'm guessing as interest rates rise, fees typically go down? Or does it not work that way?
My guess is that I could "shop around" but probably won't do too much better if I want to stay with a "local" lender.
Now is historically a really good time; rates are quite low. Nobody knows what rates will do.
The mortgage industry is a competitive landscape. There are plenty of people who don't shop around, and so get charged fees. I think there will always be companies that charge those high fees and get away with it. They stay around because they make a lot of money on the fees people pay them.
Not sure why it matters to have a local lender. I always shopped nationally. I was able to interact with my lender through email, phone, and mail. Works just fine if the lender has their act together, so I always chose a company that had a good reputation. When I signed papers on my last refi, it was with a company in Virginia. They just hired a local person to come to my house, and I signed the papers on my kitchen table.