Mortgage Refinancing: A Brave New World

We’re in the midst of refi­nanc­ing our home, to take advan­tage of the cur­rent attrac­tive rates. It’s been an eye-open­ing expe­ri­ence to see how the process has evolved since we last refi­nanced 5–8 years ago.

The lenders’ reliance upon web-based data col­lec­tion ser­vices has cer­tainly eased our bur­den, and saved us time in sup­ply­ing the needed infor­ma­tion. Inter­ac­tions with the loan pro­cess­ing agent take place by phone (or less sat­is­fac­to­rily, via an online doc­u­ment track­ing mech­a­nism.) We deliver fol­low-up doc­u­ments to the loan pro­cess­ing agent by scan­ning and email­ing them, or rarely, by fax­ing them. (I believe the lender’s inter­ac­tions with our insur­ance agents are still via fax…)

The last time we did this, fax­ing was the pri­mary data deliv­ery chan­nel. This time, fax­ing is a has­sle, as we no longer have a ded­i­cated fax line, and the fax machine is con­nected to a phone line on an excep­tional basis only. Scan­ning is more reas­sur­ing because we know what the doc­u­ment looks like before it gets sent.

The other huge ben­e­fit to this more tech­nol­ogy-savvy process is its speed: it took less than a week to go from the deci­sion, over break­fast on Sat­ur­day, to explore refi rates to the point at which we had received con­di­tional approval in writ­ing and a locked-in rate. The appraiser showed up 2 days later.

To our sur­prise our cur­rent lender did not offer an attrac­tive refi pack­age, despite our stel­lar track record at mak­ing pay­ments; their rate sched­ule on what con­sti­tutes “con­form­ing loan amounts” by county is years out of date. So they’re los­ing our busi­ness.

It’s a brave new world out there, for those lucky enough to qual­ify for refi­nanc­ing. The rates are cer­tainly attrac­tive.