Consumer complaint received 2016-06-11
Product: Mortgage — FHA mortgage
Issue: Application, originator, mortgage broker — 
Company: POLARIS HOME FUNDING CORP (OH)

I was searching for a lender to buy a XXXX home for XXXX reasons. One was because I work a lot of 18 hour days and am very tired driving home. The second reason is because my wife and I are separating but not divorcing. I found a home that was less than XXXX miles from my employer. I made an offer that included {$3000.00} in earnest money. Despite having enough money in the bank to put down at least XXXX %, good credit, minimal debt, {$70000.00} equity in my current home and over {$100000.00} in 401k 's, I could n't get pre-approved for a loan because lenders would n't consider my income which consisted of several hours of overtime until I had been employed for at least two years by my current employer. My base wage is only {$15.00} but I had worked so much overtime that I had already made nearly {$50000.00} when I started the process around XXXX XXXX. My realtor put me onto this lender who basically convinced me that I could get the loan for the house. The loan officer emailed me on XXXX XXXX saying " I feel good about this loan '' so I decided to move forward with them. Despite having {$3000.00} in non-refundable earnest money at stake, it was n't long before I felt like I was just a number to the lender. Shortly after I started the loan application process, I paid via credit card for the required home appraisal. Nearly a week later, I was informed that my credit card was rejected only to find out it was because the lender omitted one of the digits on my card. So from the start, one week was wasted toward the target date of XXXX XXXX for closing. It only got worse from there as issues from the initial underwriter began to come up. I was informed of XXXX issues that needed to be addressed before the loan could be approved. One of the issues concerned language in the purchase agreement which forced us to basically start over with the seller and on the advice of the lender, they would be submitting the loan application to a second underwriter. My real estate agent was closely involved with the entire process and was basically my advocate in order to make sure things were moving forward in a timely manner. So now we are dealing with XXXX separate underwriters. The XXXX underwriter also had an issue that they wanted clarification on and was in regards to a clause in my current home agreement that had to do with occupancy. There was a section that required occupancy for a year but could be waived by the mortgage holder. So now we are being led to believe that we have XXXX separate issues from XXXX separate underwriters to overcome. The easiest one to resolve in our opinion was the occupancy issue. So, I began to focus on resolving that one but every time I spoke to the loan officer as to how to best appease the underwriter, he continually tried to steer me towards resolving the other issue that was much more cumbersome to do. On XX/XX/XXXX when we were expecting to close we were told that he " expected to be cleared to close '' on Tuesday of that week. It is here that I realized why I was being steered. The second underwriter had denied the application request because of similar issues that the first underwriter had raised. The lender did n't bother telling me or my agent this. I only found out about it when he let it slip in a conversation just a few days before XX/XX/XXXX. So he knew the application was basically dead but continued to string us along hoping I would resolve the issue with the first underwriter which I would have focused all of my attention on had it been clearly explained to me. In the end, this comes down to the lender continuously misleading us into thinking we were on track to close the loan when in fact we were n't. We had to scramble on XX/XX/XXXX to come up with yet another extension on the purchase agreement with the seller to avoid losing the earnest money, which ultimately had me switching to the seller 's lender to try to secure the loan.