HOME LOANS ARE NOT “ROCKETS”

George Lopez | September 27th, 2018

Oversimplifying the home buying process and charging extra fees only shortchanges consumers

Launching a rocket into space has always been a highly technical, complicated endeavor which is fraught with risk. As the old NASA saying goes, “Space is hard”. Throughout the history of NASA, plenty of rockets have ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico rather than in geosynchronous orbit. Many of those rockets simply exploded on the launch pad. Still others tragically cost some of our astronauts their lives. But after decades of research by mathematicians, physicists and scientists, as well as years of testing by NASA flight engineers, the United States has developed a rocketry program which is second to none.

Fast forward to the present day. Recently, a national mortgage lender has attempted to compare the process of getting a home loan to that of launching a rocket. Their advertisements proclaim that rockets are fast and that launching them is easy. There’s no need for you to understand any of their pesky home loan terms or the excessive lender fees that they charge - after all, rockets are fast and everyone likes rockets.

So what does a home loan actually have to do with launching a rocket, you might ask? The answer, quite simply, is nothing. Sure, the home loan process has its own set of terms but telling consumers that they can essentially ignore those terms for the sake of speed does everyone a disservice. You can “have your cake and eat it too” with a reputable lender like James B. Nutter & Company because our loan officers walk you through the home loan process and explain all of the details to you - and the process can still be fast. Oversimplification never produces good outcomes for anyone and it’s for this reason that this type of rocket advertising has drawn the attention of the Bureau of Consumer Finance Protection.

Another question that arises about the recent onslaught of rocket advertising is how a mortgage lender can originate enough loans to cover the massive cost of these ad campaigns. The answer to that question appears to be by charging home buyers additional home loan fees. For a company that spends millions of dollars comparing rockets to mortgages, the only way to break even and make money is to pass the cost of that advertising on to their customers in the form of higher fees. It’s a strategy that’s as old as the hills, and rockets and mortgages are no exception.

Buying a house is the single biggest investment that many families will ever make, so choose a home loan lender like Nutter that does things the right way and doesn’t oversimplify the process. More importantly, choose a home lender who doesn’t charge you exorbitant loan fees. Getting a home loan is not a terribly difficult process but in this age of instant gratification, you can’t simply press a button and get a mortgage - no matter how much we all like rockets…

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