I chose Jimmy and Caliber based on a combination of reviews, their mortgage rates, and the recommendation of my agent. This was a jumbo loan and I was a first-time home buyer. I didn't use a mortgage broker but I did get quotes and pre-qualifications from multiple places. Caliber didn't have the lowest quoted rate, but they were close, and they had much better reviews than most of the others. My agent encouraged me to pick Caliber over the big banks that were quoting lower rates because she informed that big banks often don't close on time. So I went with Caliber.
Everything seemed to go very smoothly for a few weeks. Caliber would request information/documents, I would upload it as quick as I could (usually same day), and they would thank me for the quick turnaround. There were several rounds of this document request process--probably due to the more stringent underwriting requirements of jumbo loans and the complexity of my finances--but every week Caliber would send an email update saying that everything was on track for a smooth closing.
As we neared closing, it became clear that this wasn't the case. The first sign was that the escrow service couldn't schedule my escrow appointment when I asked because they hadn't received loan documents. It turned out that Caliber was intending to sell the loan to Chase right after funding it and because of that they were using Chase's underwriters and were at the mercy of Chase's underwriting turnaround times. Jimmy had mentioned in my initial phone call with him that they sometimes do that but he'd indicated that it was rare, so I was surprised. There were TWO more scrambles to return documents to the underwriters before the loan was actually approved. Because of this, we closed one day late, but other than the stress there were no negative repercussions for us.
Despite this experience, I did get the strong sense that Jimmy and his team were doing everything they could to accelerate the underwriting, and I'm sure that if I had worked directly with a big bank like Chase the experience would have been worse. Jimmy was also able to waive a rate re-lock fee that I would otherwise have had to pay under the terms of the rate lock agreement due to closing one day after the rate lock expiration.
So overall, everything turned out, but it could have been better. If Caliber had used an in-house underwriter to take a first look at documents, I'm sure they could have saved a lot of time in the early stages of the underwriting. But on the plus side, we got our house in 36 days and there were no unexpected extra mortgage costs.