Hometown Lenders Llc

Applied for refinance to change term of existing mortgage from 30 to 15yr plus payoff Home Equity Line of Credit. We were clear from start that was all we wanted & we didn't want mortgage insurance. We also told them we had high credit scores but husband self employed & I was new to job. They said we'd have no problem qualifying. Hometown Lenders continually pushed us to borrow more money to payoff credit cards & making it necessary to get mortgage insurance. We spent $450 on an appraisal & when the appraisal came back too low, we submitted request for reconsideration. HTL's "claims" that request fell thru the cracks as over 2 weeks passed & no response from appraiser. I had to call the appraiser directly who said reconsideration had not been submitted by HTL. HTL apologized & resubmitted. When appraisal came back better & didn't require mortgage insurance, we we're turned down for loan after we'd been repeatedly assured we'd qualify. Both husband and I have credit scores over 760; longstanding excellent history for 30+ years; I spent days providing docs on employment, reports on spouse's self-emplpyment, etc. I even incurred cost from our accountant to have them pull some of the financial docs needed. Not sure why they pushed mortgage insurance so hard but they were extremely pushy about that and about borrowing more money than we needed. The owner at one pt even offered to refund us the cost of mortgage insurance if we'd go with borrowing more money to pay off car loans and credit cards. When it was evident we just wanted to borrow minimal amt w/out mortgage insurance, they seemingly lost interest. I emailed them our concerns & asked to be reimbursed for $450 appraisal but they would not even respond to emails. I even asked if the offer still stood for them to pay MI since they thought we'd be approved for conventionial loan but still no response. In my opinion, they were very unprofessional with questionable ethics.