1st Family Mortgage Company

We contacted Jon B. And met him in the office. Had a 3 hr long talk about our options for adding on to our home. Was told we would hear from the appraiser within a week and to go ahead and find a general contactor to give us a formal estimate of all work to be completed. We turned in our estimate from the general contractor and its 3 weeks later and still no appraiser, not even a call to schedule. Jon won't return phone calls and neither will his supervisor Tracy. With my husbands credit score we can go to any bank to do this loan and not have any problems. Working with 1st Family Mortgage was like dealing with a shady car salesman.

We selected 1st Family Mortgage based the local radio and television ads that strongly highlight 1st Family?s high customer-satisfaction ratings. Our experience with them was unsatisfactory, and we would not recommend 1st Family Mortgage to anyone. Yes, we received a mortgage--not a surprise since our credit is decent--but the mortgage process was memorably poor. In our experience, 1st Family Mortgage was disturbingly careless with our personal financial data, extremely unprofessional, and apparently unable to hire and retain knowledgeable staff. When we arrived for our appointment, we were shown to a room with doors on both sides. We were told it was the only room in the building that offered privacy for discussing mortgage options. All other visible office space was in cubicles that clearly offered no privacy. It turned out that the room was used as a pass-through to a larger meeting room of some sort. No fewer than 20 people passed through our ?private? meeting on their way to a party that was held in the larger meeting room. None of the people who passed through our meeting had mastered the skill of closing a door, so we had to keep closing doors after them. Despite our efforts, we endured a great deal of noise as we struggled to hear and make sense of what William, our mortgage originator, was telling us as he rattled through our options. At the end of our meeting, William gave us a short list of additional paperwork we would have to submit and stuffed our financial records into his backpack so he could take them back to his main office and have his ?girl? enter the information into the computer. He flung the backpack filled with our personal data into his car and drove off into a rainstorm. We were horrified. There was enough personal financial information in William?s ?bank of backpack? to ruin us financially. It took little imagination to come up with realistic scenarios in which a thief could easily steal our records. A quick smash-and-grab while William stopped for gas and a soda, William sliding off the road in the rainstorm and getting ?help? from a light-fingered Samaritan, the possibilities were endless. We were stunned that a business dealing with sensitive data had no process for scanning personal paperwork into a secure server and returning originals to the customer before the end of the meeting. 1st Family?s ?bubbafied? mortgage process was appalling, particularly for a business that operates in an area where so many are required to qualify for, maintain, and protect government clearances in order to work at the jobs that will pay for the mortgages they are requesting. As if the carelessness with our personal data were not enough, we had to continually come up with ADDITIONAL paperwork in dribs and drabs to satisfy various conditions. Since 1st Family only gives a specific window of time during which paperwork must be completed in order to receive the mortgage rate offered, the least they could do is provide a COMPLETE LIST of all possible required paperwork as a standard takeaway from the first meeting. As it was, our FEDERAL letter from Social Security was not enough to fulfill a condition. We had to get a letter from our doctor, which required working around his schedule as time ticked away on our deadline. We were fortunate that this did not end up costing us extra. Many medical offices now refuse to provide letters or sign forms of any kind without payment of upfront fees, a wait period of as much as three weeks, or both fees and a wait period. The fees and mandated wait periods are a direct result of the chaos created when patients require non-medical services from doctors and support staff. The lack of professionalism did not end with the lack of information provided. Several of the forms we were required to fill out were obviously scanned to PDF from some other form, because the forms were crooked and did not have a 1st Family logo. Tacky. Seriously, tacky. If a company can use a pathetic copy of a form, certainly that company can have someone retype the form on the company?s digital letterhead. It was also our experience that 1st Family Mortgage has trouble hiring and retaining knowledgeable staff. During the short window of time we had to lock in our mortgage, the person in charge of our approval process and our loan originator quit within days of one another. We were not informed that people in charge of the backpack full of our personal data were no longer working for the company. We had to call around to figure out why our e-mails to the approval person were going unanswered. We had been leaving unanswered phone messages for days when we were finally informed that the loan originator had quit. More time was wasted while the poor man, who had to add several in-process loans left by William to his already large workload, got up to speed on our loan. In the end, there was a seeming stalemate as the approval department waited on information regarding the re-appraisal the lender had required due to a fence rail. Since none of the 1st Family Mortgage process had inspired confidence, we finally ended up contacting the appraiser ourselves to be sure the approval staff had even contacted them. After assuring the appraiser multiple times that we were not trying to break the law by getting information from them (even though we paid for the bloody information as a standard part of the mortgage process), we were able to ascertain that the appraisal company had NOT--for whatever reason--received notification that 1st Family Mortgage needed additional information. The appraisal company assured me that they would contact 1st Family that day to determine and send the necessary information. While we were willing to believe an e-mail might have gotten lost, misfiled, or simply deleted, it was galling to have to pursue our own loan information--particularly since many of the fees involved in the mortgage process are document fees. The one good thing that has come out of our wretched experience with 1st Family Mortgage is that we are now active members of Angie?s List. We hope to help others avoid the distress we endured.

I would stay away from these people in the future. We have had two bad experiences with them within the past year: 1. When we first contacted them in early winter of 2011, they failed to return phone calls, or respond to all but one of our e-mails. Then I finally sent them an e-mail saying that we had not been contacted since the initial e-mail, despite several voice-mail messages for anyone (at first), and then specifically for the owner (last two messages). At that point the owner responded to my e-mail, saying that I had never left him any messages - thus effectively calling me a liar. At that point, we ceased dealing with them. 2. Some months later, another 1FMC representative cold-called us about refinancing. I recounted the story to him, and he was willing anyway to reconsider our case. At the outset, we provided information on the appraised value of our home from three years earlier, and stated that we were only interested in refinancing if they could lower our monthly payments. They assured us they could do that. After months of dealing with them, and having an updated appraisal done, we were at long last informed that, due to the decrease in our home's value, they did not have a product to offer which would lower our payments. At that point we were out $450.00 for an appraisal that we didn't need, and could make no further use of. These people are the home mortgage and home value professionals (supposedly). However, they seemed unknowledgeable about the percentage of drop in home values in this area. If they had been knowledgeable in their professional area, they could have alerted us to the fact that our home value would have likely dropped too far to make refinancing practical. That cautionary note would have saved us the lost $450.00 appraisal fee for the useless document. I still wonder if there was some sort of tie-in between the appraisal company, and 1FMC, because we feel scammed out of the $450. Overall, I would never recommend 1FMC to anyone I cared about, as I feel they are unprofessional, unhelpful, and in our case, dangerous to our wallet.