First Ohio Home Finance

Matt Berardi makes more loans than any other employee at First Ohio Home Finance, so sometimes we wonder how he gets it done. There’s always a secret somewhere when you have a salesperson out in front.

We received a piece of mail last week about Matt Berardi’s mortgage lending that really made an impression on nearly everyone at our branch of First Ohio Home Finance - and told part of the secret to the way he does business.

Like every loan we make, there was a little luck and a lot of caring communication and hard work involved in this story.

Dear Matt,
We can’t thank you enough for all the work that you did on our behalf for our recent refinance. Your expertise and patience cut our loan duration in half and we still can’t believe that low rate is really, really true! A huge weight has been lifted from our shoulders - thanks to you.
Warmly,
Carol L.

I couldn’t help but blog about this mortgage lending success. Thanks, Carol!

We love what we do here at First Ohio and work hard to find opportunities to help other Ohioans!

(HT to Alex Stenback)
We all know that most online mortgage aggregators are champions of selling and re-selling and re-selling any information you put online. They also have been linked in urban legend to unscrupulous lenders with varying degrees of bait-n-switch tactics.

A recent incident with LendingTree - which takes a short loan application and farms it out to national lenders - highlights the real problem with throwing your personally identifiable information online. Yes, even with recent innovations in “secure” protocols like SSL.

Apparently, LendingTree had employees who were re-selling borrower information to non-affiliated mortgage brokers (and maybe others).

“several former employees” may have shared confidential passwords with “a handful” of lenders that were not approved by the company. The lenders then used those passwords to access customer information files that contained mortgage request data such as name, address, e-mail address, phone number, Social Security number, income and employment information. The files did not contain credit card information, LendingTree said…. The company said it does not believe the disclosure led to identity theft or fraudulent financial activity, but recommended customers check their credit reports for suspicious activity.”

Needless to say, this underscores the benefit of dealing with a local or regional direct lender like First Ohio Home Finance. Nothing beats being able to look in the loan officer’s eye and personally seeing where they conduct business.

Don’t trust your information or your mortgage to just anyone - the result could be more than you bargained for!

This is a critical question because so many loan officers are NOT keeping up with the changing mortgage environment, but still issuing bland letters that indicate a borrower simply needs to come to closing. The pre-approval process is much more thorough than pre-qual. Read the rest of this entry »