We originally chose them since they seemed more flexible (independently owned) and advertised a single flat ~$995 underwriting fee for each loan while offering similar low mortgage rates to other competitors. However, they turned our otherwise simple closing process into the biggest nightmare:
1) Lack of attention to detail - Despite the many emails/calls back and forth to correct various items on our loan summary, our loan officer was unable to correct the document. When he fixed one error, he would somehow create another error in another part of the document. He told us that the document was not important and was more for our own records, but our dismay, we were told by the title officer during closing that the document should have been filled as accurately as possible.
2) Cannot handle confidential information - The draft of our loan summary (containing personal info like employment, banking, addresses, social security numbers) was sent via email without encryption. We can understand if it was a one-time mistake, but even after we brought this up to management, a second loan officer sent out our SSN again without encryption. (My SSN/address/employment info was stolen shortly after that, and although it is hard to say whether it was a result of the Fed Hill Mortgage incident, they took responsibility and gave us funds to enroll in a credit monitoring service). Furthermore, our loan officer emailed our info to another one of their clients. When we called to let them know, he promptly sent it again to that same person rather than to me.
3) Do not adhere to deadlines/poor communication - We were given a draft of the closing disclosure a week prior to our closing date. We pointed out a discrepancy in the closing costs (an extra ~$2300 was added to the mortgage fee) prior to signing it, but our loan officer said "don't worry about that - the numbers will work themselves out". We asked for the final closing document to be sent on Thursday (Friday morning latest) to wire our money in time. However, on Friday morning, we contacted them and were told that they were still working on it. A few hours later, we STILL didn't hear back from them so we got the final numbers from our title company instead. I contacted Fed Hill Mortgage that afternoon, and they didn't send out the final amount until 4pm, which was after my bank's deadline for wiring in money. When reviewing the numbers, we saw that the numbers did not just "work itself out" from the initial closing disclosure, resulting in us overpaying $2300. When we called Fed Hill Mortgage during closing, they said that they had been aware of the closing cost discrepancy since Friday afternoon, and were planning to get that fixed. It was very hard to believe that they had been planning to fix this without us prompting them, given that they allowed us to proceed closing the following morning without sharing this info with us. We hope it was not a way to scam customers out of more money, but it certainly felt like that from our perspective.
4) Their attitude can be condescending/willing to lie rather than taking full responsibility for some of the issues that they created. Rather than being apologetic about some things, a loan officer tried to excuse his mistakes by saying he was busy doing a million things at once and feeding us lies in order to dismiss our concerns. We had him on speakerphone during closing, and the title officer and real estate agent were both shocked at both the level of unprofessionalism and his attitude when addressing the issues that we were bringing up. If he was truly so stressed that he cannot do his job accurately, either Federal Hill Mortgage should hire more employees to share the workload or offer better pay/benefits in order to hire higher caliber employees.
We don't understand how most of their reviews are so positive. With so many mortgage lenders and brokers out there, why risk going with Federal Hill Mortgage and jeopardizing your closing process and sanity? read more