Our journey begins in March of 2009. That was when Jay [husband] and I began the process to buy our first home. We should have known then to lower our expectations of what good customer service is in today's world.
First on our "naughty" list is Bank of America. While BOA itself isn't to blame for my general mistrust of any company who provides a service, I do believe that a person (or corporation) is no better then the company they keep. The company that BOA kept was/is a man named Bob Laird. Bob would become our mortgage broker. On that chilly March morning Jay and I waited in the lobby of a local BOA for 15 minutes past our scheduled appointment time. [If you know me, you know how I feel about tardiness] Finally Bob appeared. He was a short, pale, pudgy man wearing tattered old jeans, a green fleece sweat shirt and a pair of old gym sneakers. Not exactly what I was expecting to see, but I try never to judge a book by its cover. Still, he had hardly brushed his balding head of hair. He clearly had just rolled out of bed for our 10am appointment. After fumbling for the keys to the upstairs office he finally escorted us in and asked us to have a seat. He then proceeded to take another 15 minutes t0 boot up his computer while he explained how he 'hasn't always been in this business'. What, pray-tell, had he done before this job? Well, Bob Laird worked on Wall Street before the crash. He had made a boat load of money and decided to retire at the ripe old of age of 35(ish). Well, his plan for retirement backfired and he's now out of money. He needed a job and BOA gave him one.
After spending about an hour with Bob, going over all of the things we would need to give him to obtain our mortgage; pay stubs, W2s, bank statements, promise of our first born son, etc we went on our way. We were pleased with how seemingly easy this whole process had been after hearing friends and family members complain about "what a headache" buying a house had been for them.
We WERE pleased. I'll fast forward. After looking at only 4 houses, we found ours. [Hallelujah, I couldn't take much more walking into other people's skewed perception of what nice decor is] We made the offer and after a little bit of back and forth with the old as dirt owners we were set to be the proud owners of 18 Schuyler Ave. It's important to note that within the first week we met with Bob Laird we had given him EVERYTHING that we needed to secure our mortgage, everything. Not just once, twice and in triplicate. We didn't have have a pre-approval letter. We actually had our mortgage. So here we are 24 hours from when we're set to close and our good friend Bob tells us that we might not be able to close on 6/5 because he still needed our pay stubs, bank statements and W2s. Huh? What? I thought we were all set? The anticlimactic end to this tale is us running around like chickens minus heads scrambling to get Bob all of our paperwork that he's had for months. In the end it worked out. We got a mortgage with a pretty good rate. We got our house. I could have done without the incredible amount of stress Bob's complete lack of organization caused. But hey, I'm just the customer. How dare I expect a smooth, stress-free process.
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