Building on Hold

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve last written- once again.  I apologize, but we’ve been very busy as of late.  Since the last time I’ve written, we’ve told TD Bank to cancel our loan.  Since they couldn’t figure out what was A from B, I don’t know if I ever want to work with them again anyways.  There were two reasons for us cancelling our loan (which was really heartbreaking for me):

1. The appraisal wasn’t nearly high enough, and frankly, I don’t think this company did their job especially after seeing the appeals and what they had to say for missing a bunch of stuff and then not fixing the appraisal itself. 
2. I’ve never been more sick and tired of having to explain things 3-4 times and ask the same question 2-3 times just to have a different answer in the end.  I don’t know if it was a lack of experience on the mortgage specialists’ part or laziness- either way, it was irritating.  I have the feeling it was laziness.  He took forever to respond to me too, which was not professional in the least in my opinion.

We got in touch with the woman we originally spoke to over a year ago now.  She had “retired” from TD Bank and moved to another bank.  I don’t think it was a subtle retirement, just in the way that the branch that we went to talked about her retirement and the way this woman kind of said things.  She’s been doing construction loans for 30 or so years.

We explained to her what happened with her old bank and I asked for her opinion on what we should do.  The bank she works for does a 90-100% construction financed loan, but they won’t be doing this until mid to late June or early July.  She told us that right now, the appraisals aren’t coming in high enough because of the flood of foreclosures on the market.  The worst part is, if we didn’t have to include labor that Mike and friends/family would be doing ourselves, then we’d be in the green, but the bank required us to add the labor because if something happened to Mike they wanted us to have the funds available.  I get it- but really?  Work with us here.  She also recommended that we move our land loan into a traditional land loan instead of it being seller financed so that we aren’t paying a mortgage a month on the land and it may open other opportunities for us.  I don’t disagree with her, but we’d be doubling the amount of principal just on interest if we went this way.  In the long run, it wouldn’t be best suited.  I wish we could find something that would extend our loan to 3 years at like a 3-4% interest rate.  Private investor is the only way we’d accomplish that I think!

Anyways- with all the sad/bad news we’ve received, it’s kind of put a bad taste in my mouth for the whole process in home purchasing.  Mike asked me if it’s gotten me so upset that I don’t even want to build anymore and I told him that it’s gotten me so upset that I want to prove them wrong and throw it back in their faces when we succeed.

It looks like it will take a few years to accomplish this though.  So Mike and his Dad came up with another idea that may help us in both the short and long term.  We’re working on it now, but we’ll see what happens.  I’d rather see this plan succeed before I really let it out there so I don’t have to re-explain myself to everyone on why it didn’t work.  So- if you’re interested, keep tuned and in the next few weeks, I’ll update again.