Jersey Mortgage Co

A Terrible Experience!

Jersey Mortgage was our mortgage company for the purchase of our first house in USA. And what a nightmare the whole experience has been.

Cathy Fernandez was our loan processor from late January 2013 till our closing on April 30 2013.
We were first time home buyers and this was also our very first exposure to Jersey Mortgage. We were in the process of purchasing a new house in NJ.

We were completely disappointed in Cathy Fernandez. During our almost 4 month exposure and interaction with her, we felt that her behavior and attitude shifted from highly unprofessional to outright nasty and rude.

Not only were we totally dissatisfied with the service Cathy Fernandez provided us but so was our realtor, who told us that she has worked before with other loan processors at Jersey Mortgage for clients who have had a poorer credit score than us and a lesser income but never had to go through all this problems and delays and lack of follow through and proper communication with the other loan processors.

Some of the problems we faced while Cathy was our loan processor were:

• She never read our documents and email carefully. A lot of our questions never got answered and we were repeatedly asked to submit the same documents that we had already submitted.

• She never mentioned the MFA mortgage option to us when we met her for the first couple of times to discuss what our mortgage options are. When we found out from our own search that Jersey Mortgage also offers this route we brought it up to Cathy. At that time, instead of guiding us properly and being upfront and honest about whether she could handle it in a timely manner, she just decided to go for it.

• Twice we were sent the wrong documents by Cathy and Karen. And each time we spent a lot of our precious time doing the paper work, only to know later that we have to submit a different kind of application for the loan we need.

• Just one little example of how unprofessional and sloppy her work was. While filling out the application for FMA, my wife realized that the title was held joint, while we wanted a “tenancy by entirety” title. So we mentioned this to Cathy during one of our routine conference calls, and she out rightly insisted that in NJ joint tenancy is the only option for married couples. Even a lay person like us knew after doing a little internet search that this is nonsense and in fact “tenancy by entirety” is the one option that only married couple can avail. But instead of guiding us properly which we believe was her job, she insisted on misguiding us and when my wife tried to tell her what she had found on the internet about “tenancy by entirety” Cathy became quite querulous.

• When our FMA application was taking forever, and we believe it was only because of the mismanagement by Cathy and probably Karen Carmen, Cathy told us in an email to call NJ FMA department and ask them why this is taking so long. My wife, dutifully called the department the next business day and spoke at length with the representative, who was rather surprised at receiving this call from us the borrowers as according to her this is highly unusual. It is the mortgage company’s job to get all information for the borrower from the MFA department. After speaking with the representative, we realized that Cathy did not know a lot of things in this matter which was highly incompetent of her.
 She did not know that the person to check for case status is the underwriter, Rose Mary and not the office manager Nancy at the MFA office.

 She did not know that it takes 7-10 business days for MFA office to review and make a decision on an application where as our application had only been resubmitted for 5 days.

 When I informed Cathy about all this, her response, received in a text message was:
“and how do I contact this person Rose Mary”. This is the loan processor Cathy Fernandez asking from her client.

 Then she went ahead and unilaterally, without first checking with us went ahead and cancelled our loan reservation with FMA office. And informed us afterwards.

 While informing us about this, after she had gone ahead and cancelled our loan reservation, she lied about the new interest rate and told me that she has gotten us a lower interest rate of 3.37% at 5 % down payment for a 30 year conventional loan.

 Then she sent us the forms which both of us duly signed and sent back. Those forms clearly stated the interest rate was locked at 3.37% until April 30th.

 Two days later we got another set of forms from Karen without any explanation whatsoever. In those forms the interest rate was 3.5%. When we asked Cathy and Karen for an explanation, we received none from Karen and Cathy’s response was quite dismissive and rude. She blamed the earlier lower interest rate on the jersey mortgage’s “secondary marketing department” and brushed aside our complaint.

• She lied to us out rightly on many occasions. Including the above example of citing the wrong interest rate to get us to not complain about removing our FMA application with out approval from us. Another time she lied was when she called in the evening to tell us that she is ready for us to close but our lawyer told her that he is short staffed and can not close for the next two days. When we checked with our lawyer, he openly said in an email that Cathy is lying that he or any one in his office never said an thing like that to her and that in fact the lender was not ready to close but was putting the blame on the lawyer.

• Our lawyer had advised us to not accept this change of interest but after taking stock of the situation we realized that we had no choice but to move forward as we have already spent so much money on the house, bought all new appliances and had them installed already as some of those appliances were needed for the home inspection, appraisal, home insurance premium for one year and other related charges and we had already given notice to our apartment leasing manager that we will be moving out by April 30th and had paid $10000 as earnest money. so we had no choice but to go forward with whatever Cathy proposed for us. It was too late to go to another lender as the seller had been waiting a long time with us for the closing.

• She kept a very unprofessional and inappropriate attitude with me, trying to initiate personal conversations during business calls or texts regarding the mortgage and at the same time she used to totally ignore and be downright rude to my wife.

In all honesty this level of unprofessionalism and incompetency is not limited to Cathy Fernandez alone at Jersy Mortgage. Some other staff members are equally or more incompetent. Take the example of Peter Kenny, Senior Vice President of the company.
Our first payment was due on June 1st and no one had bothered to send us payment coupon despite several emails and calls from us. When finally in a desperate attempt we sent an email to all the senior staff we could think of, we received a payment coupon in email. No apologies for the delay or explanations.

Anyways we mailed out the check via priority mail ASAP even though we still had 5 days left for the payment to go through without a penalty. We knew that the payment had been received by Jersey Mortgage in two days as we confirmed with USPS. So consider our supervise when we received an email from Peter Kenny on June 11 that we have not made our payment. This gentleman is the Senior Vice President and he does not know the status on a mortgage loan payment and without checking he just shoots off an email to us saying we did not pay.

We were so happy to know that our mortgage has been sold to another company. And we hope that we never have to deal with such incompetent company as Jersey Mortgage anymore.