Why Rocket Mortgage Doesn’t Work for Me

Currently I’m in the middle of the mortgage process. During the beginning of the process, I decided to try out Rocket Mortgage. I’ve heard about it from many of the podcasts I listen to and love the recent commercials with one of my favorite actors Keegan-Michael Key. Also any time I can do something faster with less paperwork in an app, I’m all over it. So what’s not to love? Well it turns out there are few deal breakers for me. And since you don’t hear much except positive praise right now for Rocket Mortgage, I thought I’d document some of it’s downsides.

The Good

It’s not all bad. Rocket Mortgage does have some advantages. Here are a few I found.

• Great interest rates. Their lower rate helped me negotiate a lower rate with the lender I eventually went with.
• A more streamlined and automated process. Their process starts online and is automated to go through your accounts, so it is less painful initially to get pre-qualified for a loan.

The Bad

Once you are in the pipeline, you are a sales target and nothing more. Rocket Mortgage uses the typical tools that other tech companies use to push sales. Expect welcome e-mails as soon as you sign up, followed by the typical litany of automated spam e-mails when you disengage or need to follow up on something. This whole process really gets on my nerves because every tech company follows it. Just because I sign up for your service doesn’t mean I want a storm of automated e-mails. Also other tech companies, stop sending me e-mails from “your founder” unless it really is the founder e-mailing me personally. We can all see through your bullshit marketing now.

With Rocket Mortgage though, in addition to spam e-mails, expect phone calls and snail mail too. Yay! On the good side, since they use typical marketing tools, you can opt out. When I got tired of all the automated communication, I simply opt-ed out. I actually still wanted to engage with Rocket Mortgage at this point, but I wanted my agent to call when we had something to really talk about, not when she was prompted to by some automated system. However, a simple human conversation has been removed from the Rocket Mortgage process. Only machine initiated interactions are allowed. So I never heard from them again, until they dropped the offer.

The Ugly

After not being too impressed with the typical Silicon Valley marketing pipeline techniques used to sell me a mortgage, I tried a local company. They gave me an offer and using Rocket Mortgage I was able to get their rate down. However, one curious thing came up. During the time I got the Rocket Mortgage offer, Equifax Mortgage accessed my credit. Because of the Equifax breach last year and the lack of government response of any punishment, I think it’s our duty as consumers not to use or trust companies that use Equifax. So I choose to vote with my dollars and not use anyone associated with Equifax.

Like I said, it’s not all bad but Rocket Mortgage is not the tech savior of mortgages like it is touted to be in it’s advertising. Shop around and be conscious of the techniques used to push you to a sale.