My Yelp success story

My wife and I are moving to a new house. It is almost ready for us, so we are really excited. With a new house, comes a new mortgage. Unless of course you are on Dave Ramsey’s baby step #7 which would mean that you already have your home paid off and are sitting pretty, building wealth. We are not there yet – one day soon, we will be.

A little background: our previous home mortgage was with Wells Fargo and we were pretty happy with them. So I just figured, what the heck, I’ll give them a call again. I locked in a decent rate on August 2nd. Just under the 60 day mark before closing. Things were good. The rate was a little higher from what I had seen a couple months before, but I just rolled with it.

Fast forward to last Friday. In talking with my Realtor, it was looking like our house was not going to be ready in time for the original closing day. It was going to be pushed back about a week or so. Not horrible, but still delayed. This brought to mind my 60 day period for the locked-in rate. If closing got pushed back more than a couple of days, my rate could expire.

Now, I haven’t really heard from Wells Fargo since I first locked in my rate. Yes, I received some documents in the mail to sign, and I have emailed with some questions, but it usually takes a couple days to get an answer. Nobody has reached out to me through the process. So when my Realtor emailed them to ask about extending the lock-in period, and she didn’t get any response, that pretty much did it for me. I had to follow up, and one of them replied, saying that there would be a fee to extend the period.

This gave me a way out – since I was not happy with the service and I felt like they could have waived the fee if they *really* wanted to. It was still not too late to go with a different lender. Yesterday I knew that I needed to make some calls. I did a couple google searches, felt a little overwhelmed,then it hit me… YELP!

My friend Roy has recently opened my eyes (again) to the power and usefulness of Yelp. I have been reviewing and bookmarking all sorts of restaurants. But, this time I wasn’t looking for a new coffeeshop, or a great taqueria. Yesterday I needed a lender. The first one on my Yelp results was a lender with (3) 5-star reviews. Granted, I know only 3 reviews is not that many, but all 3 of them were fairly substantial. So, I called them up. I gave the receptionist my short-story and then she asked “how did you hear about us?”. I said “I actually found you guys on Yelp”. For a second I was thinking to myself “she is gonna think I am a nut”. But no, she responded as if it happens all them time. And, she then passed me on to the Loan Officer who is mentioned on Yelp as being awesome. Long story short, I locked in an even lower rate than before, and I am getting great, local service.

Is your accounting firm on Yelp? Did you know that they have free tools and allow for businesses to claim a page and create a business account? Check it out at http://biz.yelp.com/

If you are interested in reading more about Yelp and the business side, you might want to read 9 Myths about Yelp or these getting started suggestions from their blog.