Consumer complaint received 2017-03-03
Product: Mortgage — FHA mortgage
Issue: Application, originator, mortgage broker — 
Company: GARDEN STATE HOME LOANS INCORPORATED (PA)

To begin : my name is XXXX, my email address is XXXX and contact number is XXXX My girlfriend and I, were looking to buy a home, our real estate agent recommended a company to go through called garden state home loans, so we did. From the beginning of working with this company i knew that something was wrong. My girlfriend was the one in contact with the company ; they mislead her from first contact. The root of my complaint is that the company pulled both our credit, hard inquiries and after said that no more credit inquires like the initial hard inquiry would need to be done. The company also stated in writing a 45 day rate lock on their offer. The company has manipulated and changed the terms of the offer, we are now under contract to buy a home based on the preapproval they gave to us. Now they are stating that we need additional credit inquiries ( hard inquires ) to move forward with the approval process. This is not standard practice at all, they did a tri credit pull the first time so they used all XXXX of the major credit agencies, these types of credit checks have 120 day approval periods, and we are at day 40. In addition, they gave us a preapproval letter that excluded me from the approval, i was never denied credit or notified, they just decided to leave me out of the preapproved offer and let us use that offer to sign legal documents to purchase a home, this is illegal as the legal documents signed have both me and my girlfriend as borrowers and their pre-approval does not include me. It gets even worse, the company garden state is not a bank or a lender as they market themselves to be, they are a mortgage broker, so they did not pull our credit they used a third party and the third party that was used went ahead and shared our personal information with other parties. They chose to sell/share my information with a collection agency that calls its business a financial services agency not a collection agency, so they can get away with buying information as described. These scumbags are clever, so the collection company called XXXX uses my information to search down anything they can on me to purchase in the form of debt. They somehow find information about a potentially unpaid utility bill from over ten years ago in the state of FL, They acquire the fake debt and without contacting me they just file it into collections. Obviously this company knows the state laws on debt collecting procedures so they know they can not actually take me to court on debt that for one is untrue and not mine but also because its 6 years past the point of being able to legally actively collect on the alleged debt. So what 's my point? As I stated these scumbags are clever, so this company picks up a XXXX dollar debt and gets it into collection ASAP, they have all my credit info so they know that I had my credit run to get a mortgage, the first thing the mortgage underwriter will now see on my credit report is an open collection item, they will require it to be paid to move forward with the mortgage and XXXX knows that it now has the ability to control whether or not I can get a mortgage ( as we of course are now under contract to close within the month ). The easy and fast way to get out of this situation is to pay the debt off and have the collection account removed, however I refuse to play into this game. I am now being blackmailed and defrauded and it is all the fault of garden state. Garden state never got my permission to use third parties for anything, nor do they have any signatures of mine authorizing them to pull my credit. Failed to provide or read the following disclosures before pulling credit : CIP Disclosure, POA Disclosure, Regulation B, TILA, Income Disclosure, Regulation O, SCRA. Garden States License number is # XXXX