Mario and his team were helpful, patient, and responsive. To be clear - if Mario was to work for another lender, I would have no problem giving my future business to him. In fact, I greatly enjoyed working with Mario. However, the friction I experienced during the underwriting process with Redfin Mortgage was enough to convince me to never work with them again. It is abundantly clear that the information obtained during the "underwritten pre-approval" process is not sufficient in order for Redfin Mortgage's underwriting team to consider someone "pre-approved", especially when compared with my experiences with other lenders. Despite providing Redfin Mortgage with W2's, account balances, paystubs, the zip code where we were planning to purchase property, and allowing a hard credit pull, the underwriter team still required a letter from both my boss and my wife's boss indicating our compensation would not change upon moving to the new property. For context, we were moving from an area that required a 30-40 minute commute to an area that would require a 90 minute commute due to a new baby on the way and increased flexibility with our work schedules (we both work for large tech companies in the Seattle area). In densely populated areas such as Seattle, 90 minutes is likely on the upper end of the average commute time, but not unheard of. While the explanation we were given was that this is a new requirement from the underwriting team due to COVID's impact on remote work, it still required us both to inform our managers of our intent to move and provide a reason for doing so. Causing both of us to have to inform our companies that we were expecting a baby far before either of us were ready. I'm sure parents and those expecting can empathize with the unfortunate impact this could have on people working in highly competitive industries. My message to the Redfin Mortgage team is this: if you knew where we were moving to, where we currently lived and worked, why didn't you ask for a letter stating our compensation would not change prior to granting us pre-approval to purchase our new home? Substantial stress and friction could have been avoided during the process, and you would have retained a customer instead of driving our future business elsewhere.