In article <1118853144.884161.276770[at]g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> ,
beliavsky[at]aol.com wrote:

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I can't see how having the lender attend the settlement is helpful. What
are they going to do, give you more money? When I settled on my house,
way back in 1996, the lender sent the check to the settlement company
(which was part of one big vertical corporation that the home builder
had, I believe). I signed the check over to them at the settlement.
Actually, funny story there. We got through signing all the various
paperwork, zillions of pages, and I left. In the parking lot, the
builder's representative came running after me, we had neglected to have
me sign the check over to them! I'm sure in the oodles of pages I
signed, there was something that would have prevented me from keeping
both the house and the check, so I signed it over to her ;-)

You'll get an estimate of the total closing costs prior to settlement.
Typically, you bring a cashiers/certified check to settlement for that,
along with another check of your own, to cover the small fees the
invariably forget to add to the estimate. It is amazing how many $45
courier fees they can come up with :-(

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I'd consider those the only factors. Chances are good your mortgage is
going to get sold to someone else anyway (not always, my original one
was with a lender that had a habit of keeping their mortgages). If the
lender doesn't deliver, move on to lender #2, obviously avoiding any
lenders you've heard really bad things about (bearing in mind that
you're probably only hearing one side of the story).

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Chris Smolinski
Black Cat Systems
http://www.blackcatsystems.com

beliavsky[at]aol.com wrote:
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You mean the closing? In my experience, the broker (never had the
lender attend) has attended the closing. All he has really ever done
is to make sure, with the title attorney, that the paperwork was in
order and answer any final questions I had.

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Besides cost? Referral? Professionalism? Ability to explain the
process to you in terms you can understand? I'm sure there are others,
but this is what came to mind.

Ryan

I signed a contract to buy a house.

In shopping for a mortgage, some mortgage lenders say that an advantage
of going through them is that they will attend the settlement. How
important is this? What kinds of things go wrong at a settlement, and
in what cases would having the mortgage lender present be helpful?

In general, besides cost (rate, points, origination fees), how does one
judge a mortgage lender? I do a Google search on mortage lenders
looking for customer complaints, and I have avoided one lender because
there were complaints that the lender promised a low mortgage rate but
did not deliver.