What does "No Fees" really mean?

At Van Dyk Mortgage, we provide our loans with no fees. But what exactly does that mean? Typically, mortgage companies charge you an origination fee, commitment fee, discount points, appraisal fee, credit report fee and a processing fee. These can add up to almost $2,000. When we say that we have no fees, we mean that there are no fees! The only closing costs that you pay are for your closing agent, title insurance and monthly escrows for your taxes and insurance. We do not charge our customers anything to process the mortgage.

It seems that other mortgage companies have jumped on this idea and are also offering loans like this, but beware! Their idea of “no fees” or “low fees” is different than ours. For example, we recently had a customer who was working with one of our realtors. This customer came to us for a quote on the rates and closing costs. They decided to shop around and ended up going with another company who promised lower closing costs. The other company was going to pay for the title insurance which is something that we do not offer. As it turns out, that customer ended up paying over $1,000 more than what we had quoted to do the same loan. That is because most companies pick one item such as title insurance and don’t charge for that, but make up for it in other places. In this situation, the mortgage company did pay for the title insurance but also charged the customer a $3,560 origination fee.

We offer this service to ensure that you are getting the best product at the best price. We usually tell our customers, if the rate and the closing costs sound too good to be true…they usually are.

Courtesy of Cindy Kelley, Van Dyk Mortgage Services