We got in touch with Andrew Soss because the seller was concerned about having an out of town lender, we had a pre-approval from quicken loans. We were slightly wary, wondering what business it was of the seller which loan company we used, and whether there might be some kind of collusion? Reading Andrew's yelp reviews put our minds at ease and our experience was as positive as the rest of the reviews. I've since learned that there are sometimes issues that come up that a local lender will have experience with, that an out of town lender will often take a long time to work through because they are not used to them e.g. earthquake zones reports etc. In the end, our closing got delayed a couple of weeks because of some understandable snags with the lender, such as requiring a 'field review' (a double check) of the appraisal because it was much higher than the previous sale price of the same property. They were very reasonable in terms of documentation requirements.
Andrew and his team worked well together, some of his team members such as Karla dealing with some of the preliminary paperwork, but Andrew handling the bigger issues and decisions. He must be a really busy guy, but would make time to answer all our questions, and I never felt like he rushed us. Once, a member of his team asked us for some info that another member had already requested and that we'd already sent, but that was the exception. However, they may want to consider some way of making all email correspondence regarding a client visible in one file or list to avoid this in future.
I always thought mortgage lending was a commodity business, and that the rates were the only thing that mattered. It turns out, there's a lot of different ways of doing things, Andrew put together a great deal for us, with no mortgage insurance premium, and an unbelievable rate.
We are very happy with our experience with Andrew and his team and wholeheartedly recommend them.