A1 Mortgage Group LLC

Description of Work: Refinance mortgage

Description of Work: Refinanced my home mortgage

Description of Work: I called A1 Mortgage at the beginning of June to see what they could offer in terms of a refinance on our home loan. We were looking to get a lower interest rate to save money over the long haul. (For point of reference, our current interest rate is 6.5% and we are not currently paying PMI, have 3 1/2 years of payments behind us.) I was put on the line with Nick Payne, who pulled up our address to look at comps, then said he could definitely get us a loan to save us money. My husband and I set up a meeting for shortly afterwards to meet in his office and go over our options.At the meeting, Nick told us he could get us a new loan at 4.875% interest with closing costs rolled in to the loan and no PMI, and then showed us amortization tables that showed we'd still pay the new loan off in 26 years and would save over $100,000 over the life time of our loan. He said the new loan would also have no PMI, thanks to a "new program" with "lender-paid PMI." Closing costs looked steep (just under ten grand), but with his touted savings of $100,000 over the life of the loan and lower payments effective immediately, it still seemed like a solid deal. I wanted to talk about it before we committed, and he said he could give us a few minutes but that to lock in the rate we needed to get going on the application right away. We looked over the amortization tables he left with us, and decided to go for it. He promised we would close in 7-10 days. He told us repeatedly not to make our June mortgage payment since we would definitely close in June, and our new mortgage would be due starting August 1st. We paid for the first appraisal out of pocket. Nick told us our home would have no problem being valued at $170,000 to get our loan, which is much higher than the county appraised our house at for taxes, and much more than the $159k we paid for it in 2007. I was skeptical when he said this was the value we'd get, but he assured us that the houses in our neighborhood comped it out that high. The appraisal came back at 178k and I was amazed! The lender red flagged the appraisal right away and said we'd need a field appraisal to back up the value. Nick promised that this was routine, no big deal, and that A1 would reimburse us for the field appraisal at closing, but we had to pay for it up front. I asked what would happen if we didn't close in June and we'd blown a huge chunk of our budget on the two appraisals. He assured me the field appraisal would come back with adequate value and that we would close in June and get reimbursed. The field appraisal came in at $152k, and we got just a few days notice that we'd have to pay our June mortgage payment after all or get a 30 day late on our credit, ruining our score. ( Please note, the second field appraisal turns out to have been the only accurate one of the three we had. I am not blaming A1 Mortgage for the number of appraisals we had done or their values...I am blaming them for leading us to believe that an appraisal of $170k or higher was reasonable when the field appraisers thorough review revealed that our home was nowhere near worth $178k with the comps in the neighborhood. This was where A1 lied to us...by telling us repeatedly that our house was definitely worth far more than it is.) Nick said the lender had sent some gift cards for us as an apology for all the hassle we'd been through. After a third appraisal, which A1 covered up front, we got another (apparently bogus) $170k appraisal and were good to close the loan. Nick told us we needed to pay for the third appraisal as part of our closing and would need to bring $1000 to closing. I reminded him that we'd already paid for the first two appraisals, and they were supposed to even reimburse us for the second appraisal. He started arguing with me, offered to pay for just one and a half appraisals, and then throw in the gift cards (that were supposedly "coming our way" two weeks before). After a few emails back and forth over the discrepency, I got on the phone with him and he started getting nasty and telling me I was being "impossible to please" by just asking him to keep his end of the deals he'd made, in writing, over the last few weeks. I requested a copy of all the paperwork we'd be signing the next day so I could read it in advance, and he said that "everyone typically reads closing paperwork AT closing, that's the time to ask questions." I asked for it again, he said he didn't have it. I asked for the HUD by name, and he finally agreed to email it to me. This is when I realized over closer inspection that they were charging us a 3.5 point origination fee (yes, more than $5000) and our new loan was going to be for $153k, yes, MORE than one of our home appraisals came in at. I started to question whether or not we could really be saving $100,000+ in interest over the life of the loan with a new rate that wasn't even two points lower than our current rate, and plugged everything in to my own amortization calculators. Get this: not only were we not going to save a dime, the new loan was going to cost us more than our current home loan, and add 4 years to our mortgage even with a 4.875 rate instead of our current 6.5%! Nick had severely manipulated the numbers he showed us at the initial meeting to indicate tens of thousands in savings that would never materialize. We were about to close on a refi loan worth more than the TRUE value of our home (as I then realized, thanks to the second appraisers and several calls to other loan officers for their input), were going to owe more in the long run, and were paying A1 more than $5000 in closing costs ($10,000 total with all the other bogus closing costs thrown in) for the honor of being ripped off. This is old school loan fraud right here and I had NO idea people were still getting screwed like this after the housing bubble burst and lenders got put under close watch. Well, A1 are brokers and not lenders, so they're still finding ways to steal from average people like you and me. I give you all these details to illustrate just how badly screwed you can be over something simple like a refinance by these people. My husband and I weren't out there trying to buy a new home beyond our means, we weren't trying to get out of impossible loan payments with double digit interest...we just wanted to see if we qualified for a new loan at a lower rate to be responsible and save money over the long haul. It might have been months before we truly realized what had happened to us, if I hadn't realized that they were lying to us about even small things up front. I took the issue up with the owner, and he retorted that we'd wanted "a lower interest rate and lower monthly payments" and that they'd given that to us. I requested a refund for the $795 we are out of pocket with the appraisals, I was told by the owner to go ahead and contact my attorney.