Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly I don't think you'll get good faith considerations on whether we're heading into a recession. Anecdotally, I'm trying to buy a house in Portland. I stopped being so aggressive as I watched prices start falling by tens of thousands. I got a call from Rocket Mortgage the other day where they tried to convince me that market prices won't change and I should buy now at a rate of 6.5%. This is an incredible departure from reality and similar to what I hear from real estate agents.

This is a company that I know previously to be quite ethical, yet here they are doing dirty tricks. Market falls can be a threat to companies, but by engaging with propaganda trolls can influence the market and make money. Read any mortgage or real estate propaganda and you'll see they're all using the same words, false comparisons, etc. Maybe the true signal of a recession is the defiance of admitting there is a recession.

Rocket Mortgage is literally terrible about high pressure selling tactics like that.

I was able to find much better deals than riding the Rocket, all I had to do was email and (gasp) talk to someone on the phone. Quite easily handled.

During my last mortgage search, my personal experience is that mortgage rates were positively correlated with the number of commercials I've seen for their services.

I ended up asking my real estate agent for suggestions and she suggested a local hole in the wall originator that gave me significantly better rates than anyone else.

Unless you have something strange, all mortgages get sold into the same pool at basically the same prices, so increased marketing spend has to be made up somewhere.

“Push button, get mortgage” — was their tag line for a while.

It’s stunning to me that people will outsource all decision making to an app they saw in an advert, for their most expensive life purchase.

Their rates are terrible, and even light research would show they were uncompetitive, but it seems many americans value convenience over common sense.

Don’t get me wrong, Rocket is a terrible deal but you can do a lot worse. After using mortgage servicers that required me to use a literal fax machine, took 2 months to close, and who’s idea of an app is a broken website that requires Internet Explorer, they are much easier to deal with.

They might be correct if the assumption is that interest rates are going up (but that's not clear so is definitely in the FUD area of propaganda techniques)

Ethical mortgage company is an oxymoron :-)

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