TexasLending.com fast pre-approvals, slow subsequent DISapprovals; Many approvals and Denials on the same loan; Cannot make up their mind! Dallas Texas

April 11, 2008

I am writing in regards to Texas Lending.Com, a mortgage company in Dallas. Their website claims that they "provide 100% financing for credit scores above 700 and full income documentation". For people who meet this criteria this should be the end of story, right? Wrong! My boyfriend attempted to obtain a mortgage loan through them and he was assigned (Anonymous)
who is one of the loan officers. My boyfriend has credit scores that hover around 740 or so, but definitely not under 720. He has excellent credit and makes about $2900 per month, not including my income, and he provided the full doc necessary to prove it. This loan officer told us there would be no problem getting a loan, despite the debt-income ratio being slightly high (about 55 or 56%). This loan officer knew all this from the beginn-
ing, every detail of this was stipulated by us and the loan officer said over and over, endlessly, that it should NOT matter.

About two weeks ago, we obtained the pre-approval letter, with conditions. We looked closely at all the conditions, and all conditions would have been met or unchanged at closing, of course.

Almost four weeks into this process, the contract for the house that we were going to buy is set to expire today. Yesterday we contacted TexasLending.com all day long, and was only able to talk to our loan officer a few hours before closing. The underwriting on the loan came back and said that my boyfriend did not make enough money for the loan, basically,(this is NOT a jumbo loan, the mortgage amount is around $100,000) and so now we tried to put my income on the loan. My credit is poor, only 568, but our loan officer said that as long as the score was over 530 that there should not be a problem with the underwriting. So they try to use my credit and income. I had heard (from a reliable source) that a banker could use my income without having to check my credit as long as I and my boyfriend were NOT married, which we are not; but our loan officer and another at Texas Lending said that I DID have to use my credit if we wanted to use my income for the loan; okay, fine. Our loan officer, again, said that it should not be a problem and that the underwriting should be finished by today. Well, today came and my boyfriend tried calling our loan officer all day to get the final approval letter.

Finally, at 12:15 pm and still no word from our loan officer, we decided to call the OTHER loan officer. The other loan officer had said that he had not seen our loan officer all day, so apparently after telling us the day before that he would send us the approval letter BY today, our loan officer took the very next day off without either sending an approval letter, any letter at all, any word or anything. Again, today was the contract deadline. When we contacted the OTHER loan officer, he had no clue what was going on with the underwriting. He had to check, and told us that my credit score was too low, even though our usual loan officer had said the day before that as long as it was over 530 that it should be fine.

All this, and it took ALL day just to get THIS answer. Apparently now we are denied, and literally five days after paying $500 non-refundable check to the appraiser and a nice $99 fee to our loan officer to process the loan. There is no excuse for this. The loan officers kept telling us different stories of what was going on with the loan process. And, by the way, we also had to pay the sellers of the house earnest money (any money that we paid was AFTER the pre-approval letter, so that we could TRY to be on the safe side)
but after being pre-approved, we are post-denied (for lack of a better term).

We are out of at least $850 (earnest money, appraisal fee, loan officer's processing fee).

Something needs to be done about this, and I won't give up until something IS done.

This really isn't even the entire story, I have found out various more things in the past few minutes concerning TexasLending.Com that pertains to blatant incompetence in the processing of our loan, but I neither have the time nor the energy to go into it; this letter is already as long as my arm, and I and my boyfriend are mentally and physically sick and exhausted from this process that was almost four weeks of HELL. They also should be investigated for false advertising, bait and switch, predatory lending practices, incompetence, you name it.

This matter has since been resolved by TexasLending, however we still wish to pursue with this report because we feel that this matter could have easily been resolved a lot sooner and more easily than the way this
lending company had handled this. The CEO had to resolve it. This is ridiculous. (Not over yet, read below)...

April 21, 2008, UPDATE: Now it is almost two weeks later, and four days from closing. Guess what? It's not over yet....(OOPS... TL.com did it again!)
The TL.com underwriting, YET AGAIN, has come back and stated that NOW the house we were purchasing, or trying to, is in a "declinable market", or something and that we need to come up with an additional $2000 down
payment, because they suddenly decided that the home had been on the market for too long. That is fine, we said that we'd pay the extra but the closing date would have to be post-poned until we came up with the extra money. But this STILL was not the end of it.....

The underwriting came back, YET AGAIN, a few minutes later, telling us to send another paystub, then at the same time they said that our debt-ratio
was all of a sudden 3% more than what they wanted, without bothering to look at the new paystub that we just sent that they had just requested (and they had also raised the debt ratio allowance from 55% to 65%, and all of a sudden our debt-ratio has raised by a full 13% in the past three or four weeks. Yeah, right). All this after everything was supposed to be set for closing, AGAIN.

Our "wonderful" loan officer told us almost two weeks ago after the first "resolved" incident that it should be fine to start packing, and also told us that this loan will be 100% financed, verbally; actually, he said this repeatedly!(Although after all this, why we would listen to a word he said is beyond me; I guess we didn't have much choice). We have packed most of everything in this entire house to get ready to move because if we would have waited much longer, we would have had to wait till after closing to start packing and it would have been harder to find the time. Now we have to unpack? Almost SIX weeks later since we started with TL.com and we still don't know if we're approved or not; even though over and over TL said that we were, and not just from the pre-approval doc, they said that we were "Auto-approved" about ten days ago, whatever that meant; apparently didn't mean sh*t.

I will also copy and paste the email from the realtor; the realtor sent this email to (our loan officer) on our behalf, also complaining about TL's handling of the loan process. This email is below: (I've left out names and certain other personal things):

(To the loan officer), in the first paragraph it says the list is found in Document #6140. Where is this document found in Fannie Mae or Flagstar?
If the new list isn't out yet why are they using it? It would look really bad if they are using the new list some and sometimes not.
I feel like (rip-off reporter) has bent over backwards to give you what you have asked for. The house appraises out. Seller is contributing 3%, Buyer is contributing 3%. (rip-off reporter) has repeatedly asked you if everything is ok and you have told him it was. We even extended the time for the financing contingency and now that has passed. The home inspection report was good too.
Please go to bat for him. Figure something out. He has told his landlord he is out at the end of week. Here is the information out of MLS showing when the price was lowered. As you can see it was listed at --- from 3/20/2007 to 7/20/2007 when the price was reduced only to ---. Then it was reduced to the current list price of --- on Jan. 19, 2008.
Let me know.
Thanks..
(The Realtor)
(End of the Realtor's email)

In addition to filling out this report, I have already gathered documents ready to send as a complaint about TL.com to Texas Savings & Mortgage Lending Dept. in Austin. We will also be looking into suing. If we only knew THEN what we know NOW about TL.com. So far, the only thing one of the other loan officers have said about our situation is "sorry". Sorry?! Lending companies like this do things like this to clients just simply because they CAN. By the way, it is now THREE days before we were supposed to close. So far, no word yet today (9:10 a.m.) if we are really denied for the loan or not because of the sudden BS rise in my boyfriend's debt-ratio. Even if TL.com does resolve this AGAIN (about the debt-ratio), they'll just pull something else out of their magic bag of tricks before closing.

Tired of predatory lenders
sherman, Texas
U.S.A.