HomeState Mortgage, Inc. will not give, sell or distribute your information to any other parties for marketing purposes. As a borrower, you should know that mortgage transactions are a matter of public record and that third parties can obtain information about your transaction from many other sources for use in their marketing activities. In some cases, marketers may even use our name, but the fact remains that these marketing activities are neither condoned nor abetted by HomeState Mortgage, Inc. When you visit our website, we do not collect any information about you unless you fill out one of our request forms. That means we do not use cookies, collect your IP address, or do anything else to identify you until you give us this information yourself. You can browse through our web site without being concerned that we have done anything to infringe upon your privacy.
Information GatheringWe gather your information for 3 reasons:
- To provide you with a rate quote or pre-approval.
- To lock in a rate.
- To process and fulfill your loan application.
When you apply for a Quick Quote, we consider you a customer and extend to you the confidentiality protection required under the law. Because a Quick Quote is only a good faith estimate, we do not check your credit, and we do not share your information with any other party.
When you apply for PRE-APPROVAL the information you are providing may be shared with other parties involved in the obtaining of financing for this transaction. This information is used to gather documentation on any borrower included in the transaction or on the subject property. It is also used to process, underwrite and provide closing documentation for your loan application. All such parties are constrained by confidentiality. Whenever you submit information to us for a rate lock, you are hereby considered to be giving permission for us to check your credit and to use this credit information to evaluate your eligibility for the loan program you have requested. By requesting this either type of transaction, you hereby certify that you are requesting a mortgage loan either individually or jointly and, in the case of a joint transaction, you are certifying that you have the right to make this representation on behalf of the other person listed on this application. If this is a joint transaction, both parties must sign all required documents to complete the original application at the closing.
In addition to what you provide us through our website or your loan documentation, we obtain information about you from other sources, depending on the type of application you make. These include credit reporting agencies, employers (for verification of employment), landlords (for verification of rent payments), real estate agents involved in a purchase transaction, and creditors holding liens to be paid off in a refinance transaction.
Information UseWe use your information to verify incomes, assets, liabilities and creditworthiness, as well as conformity to underwriting guidelines. We share this information with:
- The investor or investors to whom we are presenting your transaction for financing.
- The underwriting companies the investor has selected to underwrite our applications.
- The credit bureaus we use to obtain your credit history.
- The appraisers we use to appraise the subject property.
- The attorneys or settlement agents we use to close and record the transactions.
The investors and the underwriters are third parties who are not under our control and, once the data we have about you has been given to them, that data falls under their confidentiality guidelines, which must conform to the same state and federal requirements as ours do. However, we cannot guarantee that these organizations will not share this information with third parties. The appraisers and attorneys we use are our sub-contractors and are required to conform to our confidentiality requirements.
How to Prevent your Credit Information from being Distributed
The investors to whom we sell your mortgage, and the underwriting companies they use, are covered by the same regulations as we are. When we sell your loan to an investor, the investor is under the same obligations with respect to protecting your privacy as we are. As our sub-contractors, our appraisers and attorneys operate under our confidentiality requirements and are bound by the same agreements, which means that they cannot divulge your confidential information.
