Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

closingwtf.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 175 posts

Re: Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

#41

Post by simfree »

_yb2s wrote: post #11
brendanjbond wrote: post #6

I once knew a founder of a pre-GPT-3 AI product that analyzed certain cost-adjacent documents to find "hidden" optimizations. The "AI" was the founder, an expert in that industry, churning through the uploaded documents himself and writing reports by hand detailing potential cost savings. How far we've come!

Some people suspect that is still how many of the AI startups operate

If there are only a handful of operators in a given industry and they use the same billing format, why not?

Create a known good OCR to calculation mechanism, then generate reports based off it. If it is inaccurate, its probably a small amount of logic to fix it.

With GPT you could even get it to write the parsing logic for you perhaps, and maybe process bill data when a bill doesn't exactly match existing parser data.

Re: Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

#42

Post by gruez »

scottishbee wrote: post #39
b1ngb0n1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the personal details (name, address, etc), they can collect pricing info on houses, run analytics, and swoop the deal with a slightly better offer or better yet, sell it to wholesale buyers, reits, and whoever is interested in stealing the deal.

That...is not how mortgage servicing companies operate.

People aren't concerned about giving their details to a mortgage servicing company, they're concerned about giving their details to a random website called "closing.wtf", which promises to provide mortgage advice for free with no other obvious revenue source.

Re: Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

#45

Post by gruez »

b1ngb0n1 wrote: post #33
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimately curious, what’s the worst they could do with this data?

Aside from the personal details (name, address, etc), they can collect pricing info on houses, run analytics, and swoop the deal with a slightly better offer or better yet, sell it to wholesale buyers, reits, and whoever is interested in stealing the deal.

>they can collect pricing info on houses, run analytics

AFAIK house sale prices (ie. property transactions) are open in many (most?) jurisdictions.

>and swoop the deal with a slightly better offer

How does that even work? The winning bidder is presumably someone who gave the highest offer. Why would another company pay above and beyond that, considering that there's probably several other serious buyers who aren't willing to pay more?

Re: Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

#48

Post by [deleted] »

aaln wrote: post #5
kojeovo wrote: post #2

The privacy and security part is not inspiring confidence. Scrolling to the next section got me thinking "Don't get scammed at closing, get scammed before closing after uploading your mortgage documents to a random website." Cool idea though.

Hey, Aaron the builder here. The scamming that happens to homebuyers is not even comparable to the risk in uploading docs to a website which promises they won't share user data with anyone. This is genuinely a pro buyer tool with no association with any 3rd party. The tool has already helped many people negotiate and get a better deal on their mortgage. Please before judging understand that 70% of buyers overpay in t…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs

#50

Post by SoftTalker »

AntiRush wrote: post #37
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimately curious, what’s the worst they could do with this data?

The most common scams around home buying are wire fraud - contact the buyer pretending to be the title company and steal their money. The data in a mortgage is exactly what you need to enable these scams and you're getting people to hand it to you and at the same time tell you they are about to wire money.

I have never done a wire transfer at a residential closing. I come to the closing at the title company office with a cashier's check from my bank for the amount they told me to bring.
Post reply on HN