I would like to share my experience with SBI Home Finance. I was trying to switch my Home Loan from another Bank to SBI.
1] Summary -
SBI Home Finance has not changed much from the older days of babu-dom. It apparently has no interest in offering loans to customers. Customers have to run after them, pleading, proving, pleasing them to get the loan application passed. You as a customer will not get correct information from them in the process, leave aside any help to get the loan sanctioned. The demands of the Bank are irrational. The Bank is still living in the days of babu-dom and requires tons of documentation., most of it is unnecessary, esp in switch cases. The Bank is keen to reject your file, on the slightest pretext, if one of these useless documentation is not present. They will make least effort to work out our loan. If the loan does not work out, it is your problem.
DETAILS -
2] Loan Application document submitting timeperiod - 4 months.
3] My home-loan amount is 7.7 Lacs. The value of the house now is 50+ L. The SBI wants a guarantor for the loan. This is unnreasonable.
4] It wants Guarantor from the same city. Guarantor from Mumbai is not acceptable, though it has branches in Mumbai. This indicates lack of integration and centralization in the bank.
5] The information given by SBI was not complete at any given point. 4 iterations took place, and I ended up submitting "4" files, expanding the whole process to 4 months.
The SBI Front Executive does not check the documents. Everytime it goes to the Back-office and back-office comes up with something new everytime.
6] SBI does not have any pro-activeness in the loan application process. It will not initiate a single request of feedback on its own. You will have to run after them.
7] The responsiveness is very poor. There is no response to emails. The SBI executives do not have an official SBI email id. The SBI executive will never follow up on the customers loan. The SBI Executive did not even give me a Loan Application Number in all these 4 months, in spite of requests.
8] The philsophy is not to find reasons to APPROVE the loan, but rather to REJECTit. The earlier bank had checked all the documents of the property 7 years ago and that is insignificant to SBI. They want all kinds of documents, which are more for troubling the customers of finding the reason to reject the file.
e.g. The Property documents are submitted in totatlity, including
Latest Property Tax Receipt
7/12 Extract
ULC Order
NA Order
Commencement Certificate
Title Search
NOC
Development Agreement(1 owner sample provided)
MOU
POA(1 owner sample provided).
If there were 5 owners to the Title, they want MOU/POA of all the owners. The property was built 7 years ago and the SBI evaluator has come and verified it, but still it wants the documents of all the owners of the land. This indicates lack of coordination between various departments, e.g. Verification and back-office
9] There is incoherent communication from the SBI front executive. Documents which are told to be not required are asked for after 2 months.
10] SBI accepted MF investments as a part of guarantee for the takeover process. But only SBI MF. This is a ridiculous reasoning.
11] Total documents submitted by me run close to 100, with as many as 300-500 pages. And the Loan stands rejected.
12] I feel SBI is not worth the effort. One can get a loan from other banks with a relatively much lesser effort and have a good experience.
The only advantage of SBI is its interest rate, however that is completely undone by its process, approach and attitude.
Thanks,
Abhijeet