Mortgage lenders with the best service

A mortgage lender that bungles the closing process or fails to respond to borrowers’ requests can turn buying a home into a nightmare. That’s why when shopping for a mortgage loan, you want to find a lender that provides stellar service.

Based on an analysis of a customer survey and complaints submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine awarded top medals to these mortgage lenders:

Gold

Rocket Mortgage takes the No. 1 slot in our ranking for the second year, outscoring its competitors by a healthy margin.

In mid-2021, Quicken Loans fully rebranded itself as Rocket Mortgage, which had previously been the name only of its online mortgage-approval platform. Detroit-based Rocket is the largest lender of residential mortgages in the U.S.

Rocket was one of the leading mortgage lenders in our customer-service survey, and it significantly outperformed other contenders in our analysis of CFPB complaint data. Despite its hefty size, it received just over 600 mortgage complaints in the one-year period we studied — fewer than all but one of the other finalists. About half of complaints involved applying for or refinancing a mortgage. Trouble during the payment process and issues with closing on a mortgage accounted for many of the other complaints.

Rocket’s web and mobile-app tools for mortgage applications are well designed, with detailed questions to guide customers through the process. But we encountered some bugs. With the app, for example, we sometimes had difficulty backtracking to edit a previous page or navigating to the next page despite correctly filling in the required fields. Customers who already have a mortgage can view a “Loan Snapshot” that shows the components of their payment in a chart (including how much goes toward principal and interest, escrow and fees), plus some other tools, including an estimate of their home’s value and price and sales trends in their neighborhood, using data from sister company Rocket Homes.

Silver Chase

takes second place, proving its all-around strength when it comes to customer service. It matched Rocket as a high scorer in our survey, and it had a favorable ratio of CFPB complaints compared with its market share. Most mortgage complaints had to do with applying for or refinancing a mortgage and trouble during the payment process.

As with Rocket, its digital tools for mortgage customers include some nice extras, including trends in your neighborhood’s home sales and prices and the ability to search listings if you’re in the market for a new home. Chase goes the extra mile to help customers understand and manage payments and escrow accounts, offering informative videos on its website.

Bronze

U.S. Bank rounds out the top three mortgage lenders, with a respectable survey score and CFPB mortgage complaints that were roughly in line with its market share. The majority of complaints regarded trouble during the payment process as well as applying for or refinancing a mortgage.

DREAMSTIME