Sharing my experience of Home Loan with 3 banks.
HDFC Ltd
SBI
Axis Bank
Summary: If it is an outright purchase of a property where your only interaction with the bank it at the start and later on it is just collection of yearly income tax certificate, then any bank with the best interest rate is ok.
But, if you are going for a composite loan I would advise you do some due-diligence. Below is my experience with both types of Home loans with various bank.
Each of them have advantages and disadvantages. And more over experience differ from person to person.
Experience with HDFC Ltd
I availed a home loan from HDFC Ltd, Koramangala to purchase an independent house around 2005.
It was a very pleasant experience during the loan sanction as well the one time disbursement. Since my salary account was also with HDFC, things were even more simpler.
All the interactions with the home loan people both personal and over email was very warm, professional and accurate.
Had this loan till 2010 and all my interactions with the customer service be it for as simple as income tax certificate were excellent.They have an online portal to track your entire loan, which I think is the only bank having it and I can still see my loan details even though I have closed it.
The only thing that bothered me was I felt their interest rates were a little on the higher end.
Around 2010, SBI came up with the Teaser Loan(first 3 years fixed rate) offer and hence I decided to switch.
Even the switching process was also transparent and accurate.
I am very happy with the service provided by HDFC Ltd.
Experience with SBI. Around 2010 SBI came with this Teaser loan which tempted me to switch my loan from HDFC to SBI. The interest rates offered by SBI was superb!
The process of getting this loan(takeover loan) sanctioned was horrible! It took me around 2 months with lots of running around and follow ups to get it finally done.
I directly walked into the Koramangala 3rd block branch and applied for it, so there was no agent as such for this.
I thought takeover loan, for a BDA property and also a loan with is just 25% of the actual property value should have been easy, but I was horribly wrong.
Infact their legal scrutiny is the most detailed and exhaustive even when compared to other Nationalized banks. The advocate has to enhance the report if it is for SBI.
I had to run around for the legal opinion report, engineer opinion reports etc.
All the documentation was collect by me and submitted to the 3rd block branch. The person incharge for the loans was helpful and guided me.
Once submitted I got a call to visit their RACPC at St. Marks road.
When I go there to sign the papers, I realize that they have auto sanctioned an additional loan of Rs. 90, 000/- for insurance to the loan of Rs. 26, 10, 000/-.
This was a total surprise to me and was never communicated to me at any point in time. When questioned I got a very pathetic answer that I have to go back to 3rd block branch and talk to the Manager.
It was already 2 months into this running around, out of frustration and with no other choice I accepted the loan of Rs. 27, 00, 000/-
Now I am not sure if this insurance of Rs. 90, 000/- was a compulsory thing? I never had to worry about it in HDFC. I have my own individual life insurances to take care of this loan and more over the property is far more expensive than this loan. If I had known about the insurance, I might not have switched to SBI at all.
So my experience with the SBI RACPC was very bad! It was the typical govt office, don’t care attitude.
Now the interaction for getting any details about my loan or getting an income tax certificate is all cumbersome or I am unaware of…
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Experience with Axis Bank
I was impressed by their ad, specially the ones stating that they are the “hum saat hai” and no pre-payment advertisements.
I thought this bank a nationalized(formerly UTI) one has turned itself on par with the private ones like HDFC and ICICI.
But I am totally WRONG!
This is my second home loan and I was wanting to go with Axis bank. Since this was a joint home loan initially they refused when I visited them in the branch.
But one fine day I got a call from a Direct Sales Associate(DSA) that he can get me a joint home loan from Axis. I felt this was such a wonderful day! BUT, today I REGRET GETTING THAT CALL!
The process is not transparent at all! The DSA is not an Axis bank employee. So whatever he say has no value at the end of the day.
The DSA mislead me in so many things which also resulted in unnecessary financial losses to me, but when I question the bank, they don’t take the responsibility because those things were not communicated to me by the bank, instead by the DSA!
The fun(I am being sarcastic!) continues since this loan is a composite loan. So all my interactions to get disbursement for construction as per the phases is very poor!
The process is not transparent there is no update on when and for how much the evaluation is done and when will the disbursement happen.
I have to constantly keep chasing the DSA; But the DSA doesn’t have the answers since he doesn’t have any ownership. The Axis bank employee don’t talk to us!
The suffering increased exponentially when I had to go for an enhancement to the sanctioned loan amount. It took more than 1 month to get the enhancement loan(while the original loan took only a week)!
The delay was due to a calculation mistake on the bank part in calculating our eligibility. The delay could have been avoided had they talked to me or listened to my explanations. Instead the responses was arrogant.
Only when I escalated to the Loan department head and explained the correct calculation, they agreed and sanctioned the enhanced loan.