Trusting A Home Lender That Engages With You

When you get your offer for your next home accepted, the next step is to get financing for your home, right?

With so many lenders wanting your business, choosing one is not an easy task. Just like realtors, you do have a choice of a lender to go through.

Luminate Home Loans is one such choice. Perhaps one that specifically wants our business. It is a national company with an office in Minneapolis serving the Twin Cities and beyond. Their focus is on residential home loans – including condominiums and townhomes.

Why Luminate Home Loans? Liz Peter, Mortgage Loan Originator at Luminate’s Minneapolis office, explained that because of their level of experience, “we have been doing a lot of loans, so that helps. And then we deliver an incredible experience for our customers and for all of our clients. We educate; we communicate well. We’re there for them. We’re very responsive, and we’re very strategic in how we help them find the best option for them for financing.”

In a tough home market, you need to connect with the right people to assist you in the critical part of the transaction – the financing. Both Peter and Dylan Bode, a Mortgage Loan Originator at Luminate’s Minneapolis office, are working with their clients through the highest lending rates in several years, coupled with the rise in home prices and the lowest home inventory in recent history. As Bode pointed out, they have seen conventional financing rates “hitting 8% for the first time in 23 years.”

Finding the right people to work with, such as Peter and Bode, comes with experience and industry connectivity that clients can trust. “We have a lot of relationships with a lot of different agents in the Twin Cities that have been developed over Liz’s 19 years of lending,” Bode explained. ”I was a real estate agent for a few years here myself and have developed quite a lot of relationships.”

The core of these relationships is based on their connection with the LGBTQ+ Real Estate Alliance. “We get a lot of organic referrals from realtors that have trusted us and then just a lot of repeat referrals from clients that we’ve worked with time and time again sending us business through that,” Bode explained. “We’re a primary lender for countless agents in the Twin Cities, quite a few and their teams.”

Relationships only matter when you have buyers working to close on their deal for their new home. The matter of the relationship between the buyer and the lender becomes even more critical. There are so many lenders vying to finance your home and lock in the rate, that a home buyer simply becomes a number. As Bode explained, a home buyer needs to “close on time. You need to have a solid person there to count on. And time and time again, our agents tell us we just can’t send our clients to other people because we’re so afraid that because of the one-off bad experiences that they’ve had with bigger banks, they’re so afraid that they’re not going to get that experience that they know that they’re going to get with us.”

That is where Luminate enters in conversation. “The first phone call with us is always we just want to make it so easy because talking about money and talking about finances for clients can be so hard,” Bode also explained. “It’s scary, especially for first-time home buyers, that initial phone call people have in their head, it’s really freaky to get out there and talk to a lender about borrowing money. And, we really want to make it warm and welcoming and kind.”

“Whether they talk to Liz or whether it’s me they’re talking to,” said Bode, “people get the same reaction of, ‘Oh my gosh, that was one of the nicest phone calls you ever had about money.’ I just think that does set us apart from so many different banks and so many different lenders.”

Home buyers want a more personal touch in the closing and escrow process. They also want options to make the process more buyer friendly. As Bode explained, “we really believe that real estate is a wealth builder. That’s our big why. It’s why we do what we do. We want to help those individuals that never thought they could buy a house buy a house, those first-time home buyers. And there’s down payment assistance programs. There are first-time generational buyers down payment assistance programs out there for people that no one in their family has ever owned a house before. And it’s the generational wealth building down payment assistance programs that are out there in the city of Minneapolis that people have access to these funds.”

Other options could also assist buyers that have been trying to sell their current home while trying to buy their new home. Peter explained that “If people want to buy, they find a house, but they want to sell their house at some point, but they need equity. We have a bridge loan so people can tap into their equity and buy first, get into their new house and then sell their house. So that’s kind of a good thing as far as preparing.”

“We love to have that conversation and then put all these options in front of people,” said Bode. And I think once they start to see these options, understand that they have a little bit more negotiating power against these sellers right now, it starts to maybe look a little bit more realistic and maybe more advantageous for them than they understand.”

At Luminate, this goes beyond securing financing for the new home. It is about being there for the LGBTQ+ community. As Peter explained, “the mortgage process, unfortunately, is a little bit invasive. It feels weird talking to someone about how much money do I make? How much money do I have saved? People, they don’t want to talk about that, right? And so it can feel invasive, and we explain to people why we have to look at things, why we have to look at credit. Something that can come up is we have to ask for HMDA information, asking their sex and their race and stuff like that. And it all feels very invasive, but we explain the why behind it so they know, and it is to protect their identity. And we also have something that helps with the LGBTQ community and, in particular, trans, which is the Safe at Home program. Because when you get a mortgage, it gets filed at the county, and your name gets filed. There’s a way that we can make it so that their name does not get recorded. And so, people need that sometimes.”

“We want to make sure our LGBTQ community’s taken care of and treated with respect and dignity, the respect and dignity that they deserve, okay?,” explained Bode. “And that they’re treated and protected in a safe environment. And our whole team, we made sure they took a training recently through [the LGBTQ+ Real Estate] Alliance, but not just Liz and I, but our processor, our underwriter, I mean everyone. Our production manager took this training so that we’re all speaking the same language that anyone in the LGBTQ+ community that comes in is every step of the way treated with the respect that they need.”

It all comes down to one thing: Engagement. Engaging with a home lender to make the financing process easier makes for a great transaction. Having those tough conversations with people who know from experience ways to make the closing and escrow process easier is what makes Luminate a choice for financing your next home.