Consumer complaint received 2021-09-14
Company: ALLY FINANCIAL INC.
State: WA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Applying for a mortgage or refinancing an existing mortgage

Complaint:
Complaint against Ally Home Loans / Better Mortgage Corporation / Ally Bank : I am reporting abusive and incompetent business practices by Ally Home Loans, who operates through Ally Bank and Better Mortgage Corporation. I attempted to get a home refinance loan on my personal residence through Ally. The experience was one of the most time consuming, frustrating, and unprofessional experiences I have ever had with any company. Here are the facts : I had a phone meeting with Allys loan officer XXXX XXXX ( NMLS ID XXXX ). I thoroughly explained my scenario as a selfemployed investor who owned multiple properties and derived my income from that. My credit score is exemplary at nearly 800 and I have a flawless payment record across every account and loan I have ever had. He expressed zero concerns, indicated no potential issues, did not state any unusual Ally policies that would apply to my situation, and he actively encouraged me to complete the loan application and get the loan refinance process started. He also said he would help at any point in the process if I ever needed any assistance ( he never once responded or followed up at any point in the entire process afterwards, even after multiple direct contacts to him ). 

I was then put through an excruciating application process that ended up taking approximately XXXX hours of my very valuable time to complete their many requests ( through a team via XXXX XXXX XXXX. They requested items that were extremely tangential to my home loan, such as all individual unit rental leases in addition to associated financial reports, insurance policies, and random documentation on properties owned by separate commercial LLCs. They also sometimes requested the same items multiple times, and they frequently needed assistance in helping them to understand documentation since they clearly were unprepared for working with selfemployed investors who had more than rudimentary W2 income.

Ally claimed to follow Fannie Mae guidelines. However, this was false since they repeatedly failed to account for extraordinary expenses as Fannie Mae does, failed to use full rental income as Fannie Mae allows, and calculated DTI differently than Fannie Mae guidelines allow. Every time I brought this to their attention, they literally just refused to acknowledge it or directly respond to my fact based findings.

Contrary to initial discussions with the loan officer, the Ally team refused to factor in real XXXX and XXXX income levels ( perhaps since those tax returns were not yet available ), even though I could provide all other documentation to support the financials and those income levels were much more relevant to my ongoing demonstrated ability to always pay my monthly mortgage payments. 

After extensive back and forth, I was denied getting a new loan because of internally fabricated Ally policies which should have been known and brought up as their internally generated issue from the very beginning. The summary of these created policies were not only highly suspicious, but different people actually changed the specifics of the policies on the fly. When I would sometimes disprove the relevance or correctness of a policy, they would even change the policy parameters or suddenly make it more restrictive and exclude me. I spent another 10 hours, on top of the initial 30 hours, pointing out multiple errors in their claims, processing, and lack of understanding on multiple topics.

Purely at their prompting and after them continually saying everything looked good from the beginning, I paid them {$550.00} for their home appraisal. They later took no responsibility for the fact that they misled me regarding my applicability within their random internally created Ally policies regarding number of loans, sources of income, etc. that never changed from the very first meeting and yet after 40 hours of work later they raised as a newly concocted issue. 

Management and customer relations ( XXXX XXXX. and XXXX ) eventually got involved at my insistence. They demonstrated a significant lack of knowledge regarding commercial properties, nonrecourse loans, passthrough entities on tax returns, and other very relevant facts pertained to my scenario. When I had to explain these concepts to them, the customer relationship managers would either just try to change the subject ( since I disproved their points ) or just flatly say I was not approved without being able to provide any valid response why. 

Aside from all of their ongoing missteps and pervasive incompetence across the entire Ally time, I am most incensed by their act of essentially stealing {$550.00} from me per their recommendation and, much more importantly, them stealing 40+ hours of my much more valuable life that I will never get back. The eventual reasons they gave for denying my loan could have and should have been known from the very beginning if anyone among their loan officer, loan processing team, and customer relationship teams were able to demonstrate competence and understanding. Had I been informed of their random internally createdonthefly excuse policies at the beginning, we could have all saved each other a lot of time and aggravation. Instead, they failed miserably in all regards. In the end, I am a very low risk and high income loan prospect who was denied a home refinance loan because of their negligence, falsehoods, and capriciously fabricated internal policies. Loan applicants everywhere needs to be warned about the provable lack of integrity and competence at Ally Home Loans.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation