I was going thru quite some reviews on Banks and HFL. Thought I would also share a few tips / thoughts / whatever you want to call it based on my experience 2 months back
Housing loans are usually a huge liability from the borrowers side say minimum 10 lacs or so. You cannot expect the bank to give you the amount just like that.(I do agree there are lot of unwanted formalities due to ignorance from either side).
My personal advice is please never never never let an executive come and meet you and process your loan thru some intermediary. This is a big amount. We have to be necessarily prepared to sacrifice some time to get our things clear and well sorted out.
In my case, I had approached an agent first. Boy I can tell u he was promising the heavens for me. Actually we got a bit suspicious and went to the HFL to enquire. Well he just ended up saying.’What.? who told u that.Oh agent.what agent.all nonsense’
Then we got our queries and everything else clarified. Beleive me this clarification process went for almost 2 weeks.the response was very good and unambigous
The HFL had very lucrative clauses with respect to floating rate Prepayment and foreclosure charges which was not available for a fixed rate loan which I needed to take
We had requested for more liberal clauses and assured him that we would get him three customers based on the same.Well he requested us to wait for 4-5 days and got back to us that the request has been approved.
He had also meanwhile given us a copy of the loan agreement which we had requested, for our perusal.and clarified anything we had asked.
After all this long winding drama which took almost 1 month, we had ben to their office and filled up the application right in front of them.Gave them all the doc’s they had requested.The loan was sanctioned and disbursed as promised with absolutely no hassles beleive me.After all this, this is what I came to know
A person to person relation with my account manager, which I feel is kind of useful.
Complete transparency in all our clarifications. I am sure there are few things which might not be conveyed to me. Ignorance(on my side) cannot be bliss always.!
The agents commission(happened on my car loan) sometimes comes as a brutal shock, which we would never have been made aware of.
The biggest issue I had was
- I had to fill all the forms, xerox all documents, write all the postdated cheques including amount in figures, words, favouring etc. all by myself(lazy me)-all these would have been done by the agent if you go thru an intermediary.
This is a big investment. A little effort from us can save us a lot of trouble.
Approach the bank Directly as much as possible.
Refer to Lots of reviews and advice from MS before deciding
.It is really useful .
And by the way, the HFL I was talking about was HDFC. HDFC Bank does not have a housing loan. Even if you go there, they will route it through HDFC
Another Good Place to take a Housing Loan would be LIC. It is rigorous, really rigorous, but you can be more or less very safe about your property once the loan is sanctioned and approved
Comments Welcome
Regards,
Ponds