My comments here apply to Citibank, not Nicole in particular. I did successfully obtain a mortgage from Citibank, and I found Citibank had the lowest interest rate and lowest fees. However, I found them very difficult to work with, and based on that, I would not recommend them to others.
Here are my experiences:
(1) Citibank doesn't understand Washington state real estate law. They required that I have funds at closing for paying the excise (transfer) taxes, but in WA these are legally the seller's responsibility. Worse, they would not change this requirement after I had a real estate attorney send them the relevant passage from WA state law.
(2) Citibank's estimates for some closing costs are wildly high -- for example, their estimate for homeowners insurance was 3-4x the actual cost. The result is that I needed to show substantially more liquid assets available to close than were actually required.
(3) Citibank's office is located 2 timezones to the east and they end their day early, so you can't reach them after about 2 PM Pacific time. This was frustrating because I had a 30-day close date and needed to make progress quickly.
(4) In Citiban's "Loan commitment letter" to me, there were errors. Nicole agreed there were errors. I asked for them to be fixed, but was told that I should just trust her that the underwriter also knew they were errors. The unwillingness to fix errors in important documents seemed unprofessional, and made me nervous going into the closing.
(5) There were about 20 requests from the Citibank underwriter. Some of these were maddening. They asked me to make a change to the contract which would have invalidated the inspection contingency (fortunately they withdrew that request when I pointed that out.) They twice asked me to sign a form which buyers don't sign at all -- real estate agents do. They required adding a 9-word addendum to the contract -- this is problematic b/c had the seller not agreed to the addendum, then I'd fail to get financing, and thus loose the house -- in other words, the bank's request effectively gave the seller more leverage (which thankfully they didn't exercise). I didn't appreciate that.
(5) The Citibank person who took information over the phone at the pre-approval stage took down information incorrectly. When I moved into contract, these errors were submitted to the underwriter *before* I was given the chance to review and fix them. These errors caused the underwriter to ask a litany of questions, which required 3 weeks of back and forth, and sending many more financial documents, additional signed statements, etc. In other words, their errors cost me quite a bit of time.
(6) Citibank would not provide me with example loan documents to read prior to signing. They said they would only send them to the escrow company a day or two before I needed to sign them. For all I know, other banks also work this way, but in any case I was not happy with having such a short time to read and understand such an important document.
Based on the experiences above, I would caution others against working with Citibank.