First Hope Bank

Review: We applied for a re-fi from First Hope Bank, dealing with [redacted] as loan officer. We acquired cc debt while repairing our home from damage by Hurricane Sandy, and were looking to take out money from the large amount of equity on our home to pay it off while getting the interest rate down. We have excellent credit, and plenty of Equity and value in our home, however in our business we both freelance and we have too many employers to satisfy [redacted] and [redacted] so we ended up at First Hope, because they recognized our value as responsible borrowers. [redacted] completed our application, we were approved, our home was appraised for double the amount we are borrowing, [redacted] had us close the cc accounts we were to pay off, he switched our Home Owner's Insurance to make their bank the payee, all of this was done in mid-May. Then he didn't lock in the rate. He took days to return phone calls, he would not communicate with us when he said he would, and as a result when the rates started to rise during early June, he couldn't close the re-fi. He has kept us on the hook ever since. He has said the bank will help "make it right", intimating they would eat part of a point, but our debt to income ratio (the debt we are trying to pay off!) requires the rate to be 4%. It was his disregard to details and lack of communication that led us to this point.Desired Settlement: Our first desired outcome is to successfully complete this loan. If that is not possible, we would like him to stop putting us off, admit that, and return our Home Owner's Insurance to the current mortgage holder, and refund our application fee. And in that case, we would like for other consumers to be aware of this bank's blunder when they are choosing where to put their business.

Consumer

Response:

[A default letter is provided here which indicates your acceptance of the business's response. If you wish, you may update it before sending it.]

I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted] Their version of the transaction did not exactly match up to our experience, and we still believe that the loan officer's initial failure to lock in the rate in a timely fashion was the cause of our not getting the loan, which is something other consumers should be made aware of. However we realize we cannot turn back the clock, and they did refund us our application fee, therefore I find that this resolution is satisfactory to me.

Regards,