Stay away from Home Street Bank – particularly if you want a mortgage and want a lender in the Bainbridge Island area. We just had a frustrating and disappointing experience with them when we co-signed a mortgage. They made an assumption about the down payment amount that wasn’t accurate resulting in many of the numbers on the various documents being wrong. It took quite a while to get them to correct the amount. It apparently took them weeks to look at documents sent to them. We had our documents sent from our local Home Street branch to the Bainbridge branch. A couple of weeks later we were told that quite a few pages were missing. They told us things that weren’t true. I asked if the closing costs could be rolled in with the mortgage and was told “yes” both verbally and via email. This turned out not to be true. I asked several times if we could pay the insurance and property taxes ourselves and not use escrow. I was told we could but it wasn’t until at least the third conversation with them about this that we were told we could but they would raise various fees and it would cost us over $900 more in closing costs. Various fees kept increasing. The appraisal fee started at $700; went to $850 then to $1050 finally settling at $1000. I asked a number of questions about these things. They stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone calls. We were told all communication had to go thru a third party. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL!
