CIVIC Financial ServicesReviews of civicfs.com

Overall a decent experience, the reason I gave it only 3 stars is because I felt like I was dumped as a client, which kind of hurt. I gotta thank Civic truly since they helped me with my first HML and helped me get my foot in the door of real estate investing. The loan process for my first flip was shaky, ended up almost losing the property but not because of Civic, because of the insurance company taking more than a month to get us the insurance binder. The civic officer I was assigned to was a really nice guy, was always around answering my questions anytime of the day. I was a big noobie, so there was a lot of annoying questions I tossed his way and I do feel bad about it. But, he dealt with me, we manage to close on my first deal and it turned out to be a big success for me. After I closed on the property, I was ready to go straight into my second deal. I tried contacting my officer for a pre-approval letter, but couldn't get a reply from him. Went on a week of no reply so I just called civic customer support for that letter. A manager answered the phone, and literally just directed me into looking at another lending company because "our rates are really high right now, check these guys out instead" which definitely threw me off. I've never seen or heard of a manager directing a client off to a competitor, it just felt like I was being passed on and they didn't want to do business with me anymore, which stung since I really wanted to develop a proper business relationship. I ended up getting scooped by a new lending company, and they've been really cool with me and taking good care. I can't fault Civic for whatever issues they may be going through back end, since they're the primary reason I was able to get my foot in the door. I'll always be grateful for that, but I can get a hint and i'll be moving on. Goodluck! Edit- Just learned the company is now defunct, so it explains why I was tossed aside.

Civic kept pushing back the loan and finding more reasons to not close my deal. After many promises to close week after week, I finally closed after 4 months. I feel civic needs to streamline their process and have better communication and accountability within their group. They are a legit company at the end of the day and I hope they are improving their process to get their loans closed in a timely manner.

The processing staff will not answer and return phone calls. It is very hard to do business that way. The AE is saying talk to processing, very frustrating. Also, there was a lot of confusion on the cash-out and the indemnity. It took a lot of effort to resolve this issue. It seems like processing has a very uncaring attitude.

Occasionally hard to reach personnel to have questions answered but overall fairly smooth.

As the first 3 posts state, they state close quick. The rep is good but the u/w and communication from them is not the best.

The process seems to drag on and on and on. With 5 loans with Civic, it seems to be the same every time. The people we deal with are lovely, but they are the messengers of the news from the big-bad-underwriters. I wish we could just get ONE list of items to fulfill, fulfill them, and then move on. With a track record like my husband and I have, it gets very old having to go back to the underwriter 4 or 5 times to confirm information we have given them multiple times. In our last refinance - last week - the loan amount was dropped to barely higher than our existing loan in order to comply with Civic's demand to subordinate the second loan. As we were trying to pay out our second lender, but would be a bit short, Civic would not allow it. This was absolutely crazy as the house is in escrow for MORE than the Broker's Professional Opinion value is. It seems this is the way we have to deal when working with Civic. We know it will be painful each and every time.

We were told the loan would close in 7-10 days, but it took longer than 3 weeks. They also came back many times asking for the same things we had already sent in - very frustrating. Also, it was not spelled out on some items they wanted and caused quite a bit of confusion. Would have been helpful if they had returned phone calls instead of sending the same emails over and over.

I understood that Civic was a hard money lender but when I started to send in the documents, it was more like a B/C lender asking for way too much for the terms and interest rate that the Client ended up with. I could have taken the loan to others with less hassle and work on my part if I had known of all the hoops I would be jumping through with my Client.. Thank you.