Consumer complaint received 2015-08-06
Product: Mortgage — Conventional fixed mortgage
Issue: Application, originator, mortgage broker — 
Company: SANTANDER BANK, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION (RI)

The process of refinancing with Santander bank took XXXX months to complete! We used XXXX as our broker and between the XXXX companies, the process or gathering personal financial information was not only redundant and repetitious ... it was excessively grueling! Due to the bank 's lack of proper document management, we were forced to comply with an egregious amount of requests for personal financial documents, sometimes many times requesting duplicates already faxed weeks prior. The obvious lack urgency in completion of the underwriting process, coupled with the bank 's blatant disregard for an appraisal appeal, forced us to forfeit our low XXXX year refi interest rate and doubled our monthly payments through their mandated, private mortgage insurance. The reason for the PMI issuance stemmed from the insultingly low home appraisal conducted by an incompetent, " independent '' appraiser chosen directly by the bank. The appraisal was riddled with careless errors and the valuation of our home was at least {$100000.00} below expected. We reacted with an appeal we offered our detailed rebuttal along with new ( more appropriate ) comps while point out the many error corrections issued in the original report. In response to this appeal, the same, biased appraiser was asked to review our written appeal and, predictably, he offered no adjustments to the appraised dollar amount. We submitted another appeal to appeal this review, stating the apparent prejudice of their review process we failed to get a response back from them and had to accept the low appraisal which, then negatively affected our income/debt ratio. The bank continued to drag out this refinancing process by requesting personal financial, tax and bank documents for the remaining months, which forced us out of our once in a lifetime low XXXX year fixed rate! We think they purposely stalled and their practices proved to be a devious and deceptive attempt to drive up our monthly payments, push us into a higher fixed interest rate which assured them a more profitable refinancing loan contract and ultimately boosting their profit margin. We ultimately rescinded the loan the day after we signed at the closing. With our rescission paperwork we requested in a letter that all our money be refunded and asked for an acknowledgment of their incompetence by pointing out these many injustices. By law, the bank needs to respond to our rescission within XXXX days and they missed this deadline. When we finally got a mailed letter from them, instead of an apology, Santander issued a spiteful retort absolving themselves of all wrong-doings while " graciously '' offering a refund of all funds paid in by us thus far ( which legally needed to be issued to us anyway ). This unfavorable reaction to our complaints only validated our perspectives of their deceit and malicious conduct all the more. As a result, we wasted over XXXX months researching tax information and providing countless documents and emails for nothing ... all we were trying to do is pay our home off quicker with a lower interest rate ... that 's it ... we were n't borrowing more money ... we have a FICO score of XXXX ... .we were never late on a payment with our existing loan or any other credit debt ... we were perfectly good customers who wanted to refinance. That 's it. this process did n't have to be so exhausting ... it was n't like that last time we refinanced! I 'm not sure why we were targeted for this unscrupulous practices and I hope it never happens to anyone else.