Just a heads up to my brothers...
The wife and I are in the process of buying a house. Something property defensible with suitable land here in Commifornia. (long story).
She found this apparently non-profit group called the MHAF, that on their website, claims to cover closing costs using donations from companies and such. Sounded like a good deal, so we engaged them.
Turned out to be a month of frustration and bullshit.
They "assign" you to a mortgage broker that you have to use. Ours was a punk ass bitch named Michael, who wouldn't return phone calls or emails, wouldn't answer specific questions like "What does this charge mean on the estimate you sent me?", and was rude to my lovely wife.
They "assign" you to a realtor who has completed "specialized training in handling VA loans and working with the MHAF". Ours was a nice enough lady that lives over 100 miles away, and doesn't know the rural area we're looking at. She also seemed really not-detail-oriented. Not exactly a star player.
They don't let you change out these people... you gotta use who they say.
They won't tell you how much the "gift" to help with closing costs will end up being. They answer almost not specific questions, and keep saying "it all depends" once you sign a contract for a house.
I've found very little info about them online, so I strongly suspect it's a marketing scam to get vets to just use a particular mortgage company.
If anyone has used them and had good results that weren't fraught with bullshit and/or hidden charges and false promises, please reply and let everyone reading this know they're good to go... otherwise I'm going to drop them like a bad habit and assume it's bullshit.
Just a heads up to my brothers, there always seems to be no shortage of civilians companies trying to take advantage of veterans.
We are very sorry to hear about this applicant's experience. We were not aware of this unpleasant experience. Had we known, we would have acted.
In order to utilize the MHAF program, applicants are required to utilize trained and approved agents because, if allowed to hire their own agents that are not trained or approved to work with the MHAF program, nothing against their agents, but they would have no idea how to assist them through the processes to receive the MHAF assistance. Without trained and approved agents, in order to help 100 applicants in a month’s time frame, we would have to train 200 agents (a real estate agent and a mortgage agent) and the process to train 1 agent last about a week. That is clearly impossible. We would never help anyone, therefore, in order to keep up with the high demand for the MHAF services and to better serve our applicants, in the last 15 years we have taken the initiative and developed a national network of trained and approved real estate and mortgage agents and have them in place, ready and waiting to serve our clients. It is the only way possible to be able to serve as many people applying for our services. There is no other option!
If for any reason an applicant is not happy with an agent, we are more than happy to assign a different agent. If an issue is not brought to our attention, we are not able to act. MHAF offers FREE money that never has to be repaid and a free service to help our applicants purchase their homes and save on fees and receive very competitive rates. In a lot of cases, we are able to help those who have been turned down by several other mortgage loan sources. We only try to help.
We do the best we can and in a perfect world, we would be happy to help every applicant but that is just not possible. Like any other organization that exists in this country, there are stipulations for participation and acceptance. A negative review like this is written and all we tried to do was help this applicant. We provide a free service and give free money that never has to be repaid. This is 1 example of an applicant who clearly had an issue with his lender and we were not aware of this issue. Again, if were aware of his dissatisfaction, we would have acted. When someone is unhappy, the time is taken to write a review. Unfortunately, the thousands that we have helped over the last 15 years have not taken the time to write reviews.
Sorry if we are not able to make everyone happy. We want to do better.
MHAF