If your mortgage is taken over by Mr. Cooper (formerly Nationstar) …. *January 2023
…run - don't walk – to refinance with another company. Better yet, pay off your house as quickly as you can. I'm definitely NOT venting, but only trying to inform others of their heinous business practices. Had we known in advance that no one in Mr. Cooper is capable of communicating, I might have taken a different stance. A mortgage company that doesn't assist their customers? Just creating the log in, going through the settings, alerts – all of it – took several calls. Why they didn't they send out instructions, instead of forcing customers to call for help is beyond me. It all should have been in the 'Welcome letter', and that very document should have been called a 'Shock Statement'. Of course, our previous mortgage company (USAA, that we thoroughly researched and selected) should have informed us of the acquisition. Ha – we had never heard of Mr. Cooper. What a way to treat us Veterans, who, in some cases – willfully gave their lives protecting our country. Problems continued with every question, and I asked a myriad of them. Here's a kicker – I even tried the secure message center for one of my questions in an attempt to avoid another uneducated person. The answer was full of blah-blah-blah that I didn't ask, suggested that I call Customer Service (!) and then they closed the ticket. Several tickets I submitted. Round and round I went, asking that tickets NOT be closed until my question was addressed, that this matter was escalated and that I was still waiting on a return call. This was only SIX weeks into our relationship with Mr. Cooper. Heaven forbid if you reach a Customer Service agent that you can't understand. I applaud hiring diversified individuals, but you have to be able to comprehend what they're saying, and vice versa. Customers can't trust anything they've told you. Ask the same question of multiple people, you're given as many different answers. One example of our numerous challenges was trying to get both of our FICO scores on the dashboard. One person said, 'sure, just make another log in', and Ms. Brooks (continued below) says it wasn't possible, that we shouldn't have been told that. What? No one can read a script in front of them? Their agents must not be trained in anything remotely financial either, let alone mortgages. Even if you've been given "their direct number to call them with aaaaaaaaaannnyyy questions what-so-ever", their outgoing message clearly indicates different hours from what the person gave you. Leaving them voicemails is clearly a waste of your time, since their obvious intention is to refuse to call you back. You feel like the right thing to do is report each and every one of them. Getting a supervisor / manager is impossible, so you try the apparent method of 'escalating'. And, their phone system is horrid. 'In a few words, please tell me why you're calling.' - says the automated voice. You say 'escalation team'. It responds, 'You're calling about payments, right?' Nothing short of infuriating, when you're already worked into a lather about your questions not being addressed by Customer Service. Contacting their manager of the Escalation Department – Amber Brooks – is hopeless. She admitted in an *email to me that she heard the offending calls, all of which wasted my time and cost me hundreds of dollars – then did absolutely nothing to resolve the issue. All of my vehement requests of them pulling calls (yes, they're all recorded and kept) did nothing to make them understand they truly were at fault. Contacting Jennifer Guthrie (never located her exact title) was also useless. No, I never found her number, and Amber Brooks reports to her. Four times I emailed her, begging for help. She never once bothered to respond. They even had the gall to have a secretary call me to say they refuse to help in this situation. All representatives say 'they're in the escalation department' and there's no direct number into that department. Profound and lame apologies by every.single.person, yet no one does anything about *your* situation, albeit promises, and all forgotten - with no follow-through. In order to remove Mr. Cooper from our lives, we started working overtime as much as humanly possible, with the plan to pay off our home, eight years early. Everything, even bonuses, extra went towards the principal. Luckily, there was no penalty for early pay off. A perfect example of their lack of checks and balances in the company. Using their online portal, I made an extra payment to the principal, and THEY decided to put it towards a regular payment, instead of the boxes I checked. Again I called, asking for the escalation team, and was forced to explain another round to incompetent folks. A nice person Amanda Bailey (office phone *******518) assured me she would reverse the payment and apply it according to my wishes. She sounded quite confident, so I didn't worry. I asked for proof when it was complete. What I expected and what I received were wildly different. She sent me an encrypted email of 13 pages, going all the way back when they took over our loan! I couldn't begin to fathom what was so difficult in asking for proof of a reversal. A problem that sent me around the bend was making a *large payment to the principal. Given all the questions I had asked about how the pay-off worked, no one bothered to tell me about the fact that you can't pay off more than 90% of your loan on their system. When making this enormous payment, I was blessed with an error message – 'It looks like you're trying to pay off your loan. You can't make a payment more than xxxxxx amount.' Boy was I furious.
Another challenge was actually getting the pay-off. One person said it took 2-3 days to create, then 7-10 days in the mail. Mortified, I asked what country it was coming from. This was completely opposite of what the website says – the box indicating 4-6 days, period. And gosh, you sure can't call to ask which is true. Well, I did – and what a waste of time. We waited and waited, and yes, I stupidly called again asking where our pay-off was. Shocked again, I was told that another agent requested a pay-off on our behalf. (!) In the same conversation, I was told that their "system requested a pay-off". I tersely said that I only requested ONE pay-off and not multiple. Then I was told that the system suspended everything. I yelled at the person, "How does this happen?!" I heard crickets. We finally got the pay-off and made one last enormous payment to the principal. THEN we received the escrow disclosure statement. Absurd to think it was nearly over. No one explained the fees associated with closing your loan. Yep, I called again. Haley, from TX, was so condescending – so I told her how much I despised Mr. Cooper, that I certainly hoped it was nearly over. You guessed it, the remainder of the escrow was shorted by all the fees. What a joke. Their mission statement is nothing short of laughable. Not one person I've spoken to has ever acted in any manner that supports the company's magnanimous declaration. Funny how many bad reviews there are of Mr. Cooper, dating back several years. Seems nothing ever changes. If you're forced to work with them, please protect yourself. Add every extra penny you have to the principal. Save every email, take copious notes, and write down the name of every.single.person you speak to. Most important - you don't have to sign with *them. Another funny thing – look at the BBB alert for Lewisville, TX - titled Government Action. Still unsure, read the Indeed reviews from folks that work for them.