My fiancee and I just bought a house in Northern Virginia and ran into
a small but extremely annoying problem in the closing process. It seems like
I've heard others complain about this, but I forget where. I'd like to write a
letter to whoever regulates the real estate or mortgage industry just to add
another voice and maybe get this fixed. Can anyone here advise me on who to
write to? Attorney General?
Here's what happened: we got a HUD-1 statement with estimates of our
closing costs and everything. We know that they are estimates. We know that
if there are discrepancies at the closing table we'd either need to write an
additional check or recieve a small refund for the difference. We're not
complaining about that.
It seems that here in Virginia, the title companies all but refuse to
get a more accurate estimate of the cash amount the buyer needs to bring to the
table. Despite our realtor and our mortgage broker making repeated calls on
our behalf, we couldn't get the number. So a few hours before closing, we went
to the bank and got our cashier's check made out for $1000 more than the HUD-1
total. We were told that they won't accept a personal check for more than
$1000 so we thought this would cover us and prevent delaying closing if we
guessed wrong.
An hour before our closing time, and 15 minutes *after* the banks closed
for the day (around 2:30pmish) they finally called our realtor and told her the
amount we needed to bring to the table. They ended up writing a refund check
for over $6,000 because our final estimated cash-on-table amount was that much
different from our HUD-1 total.
We were lucky. What if the difference went the other way? We would
have had to delay closing by a day so we could go back to the bank the next
morning to get another cashier's check. Or worse, what if we were cash-poor
and didn't *have* an additional $6000 on top of what the original HUD-1 said?
There's no excuse in the world why they couldn't have told us a closer
estimate the day before closing, yet they refused to. This isn't a
fly-by-night title company, either. It's one of the big ones in this area with
offices all over the region. How in the world do they think we can trust them
to manage a huge monetary transaction like this (ours was a half-million dollar
home purchase, which in this area is on the low end!) when they can't estimate
the taxes and fees closer than $6000? Sheesh

Sharon