Sean McPartland

Sean seemed to have little interest in whether we were able to close on time. I repeatedly stressed, in writing, to him and his assistant, the importance to us of closing on time. These emails frequently went unanswered and when I spoke with him or his assistant on the phone, they repeatedly expressed surprise ("oh, I didn't realize it was so important to you to close on this particular date."). It was only through an extreme amount of kicking and screaming that I was able to drag Sean and his team to get all of Citi's work completed for the closing, and this came at 5:05 pm on the date for which the final docs from Citi were required to close by. In other words, I was guessing, down to literally the last minute, whether Citi would be able to get its act together for us to close on time. But, Sean and his team seemed to see little problem in this - they offered little to no apologies even for the experience, so I take it perhaps this is just business as usual for them. All of this was in the context of me checking with Sean and his team well ahead of time as to whether our proposed closing date would work, receiving assurance that it would. Then, just to be safe, I pushed the proposed closing back a week from when they said would be fine. But, I think the problem is that Sean and Citi never really started working that seriously on our file until we started to get down to the wire. In other words, I don't think that me trying to put the closing date even further out would have done much good. Our purchase was for $1.2m. Perhaps this was too small of peanuts to be of interest? I don't know. Note: the uncertainty about closing on-time was just one example of this. We also had other fun experiences in the mortgage application process, like getting a call from Citi at 11:00 am on a day a few weeks prior to closing, saying we needed to drop everything and come in person to a Citi branch on that exact day in order to open a new Citi checking account if we wanted to get our mortgage. This came several weeks after I had begun pushing Sean and his team to get moving on the processes needed to initiate this new account, but again, it seemingly didn't become a priority for Citi until the very last minute. I will say, if you like suspense novels, Sean may be the mortgage agent for you. He certainly gave us a wild ride, guessing until the last minute as to whether we'd close on time. If you want a bit more predictability and responsiveness though, you may want to look elsewhere.