Financing Delays

by Tim
(Long Beach Ca USA)

When home prices started dropping in 2008, I and my wife decided it was a good time to purchase a home. We spent weeks looking at many properties on line and in person. Homes were selling pretty fast during this period, and a couple of homes we wanted were sold before we even had a chance to put in an offer.

Finally, we settled on a home we both loved. We won the bidding war between 15 other offers. We were pretty confident that the home was ours, being that we had secured financing from a reputable bank and we both had good credit scores.

Unfortunately, to secure the home, we had to remove the financing stipulation from our contract and agree to a 30 day closing. Our Realtor told us it was nothing to be concerned about since we had been pre-approved for our loan.

Well, with all the home sales and foreclosures happening at the time, it turns out that the average time to close was about 60-days. The people at the bank kept telling us that everything was going on schedule, but the documents were not arriving.

The delays were so bad that the sellers were threatening to cancel the sale and take our $10,000 deposit. In the end, I had to call the boss of our loan agent and wait on hold for FOUR HOURS in order to push things through in time.

The moral of the story is to never neglect the fine print.