From: frey@encompasserve.org (Lurker at Large)
Newsgroups: misc.consumers.house
Subject: problem with house closing
Date: 22 Jun 2005 14:25:22 -0500


	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