Terms of use

What happens when you call or write

Say roughly what you are trying to do and roughly where the house is. It gets written down. Then comes the question of whether a licensed Pennsylvania mortgage lender may ring you about it, and a yes is what sends those notes on to one — a business standing on its own, which we do not own and cannot direct. That lender does the ringing. Where the loan you described is not one they work on, a second may pick it up, and you hear about it when that happens.

That is the extent of it. Nothing else is done with what you said.

What Mortgage Montgomery County, PA is, and what it is not

What it is: a marketing and referral operation for mortgages in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It writes up how home loans work around here, it keeps a phone line open, and it makes one introduction at the end of a conversation.

Not a lender. Not a mortgage broker, not a mortgage loan originator, not a bank or a credit union, not a real estate agent, and not any arm of government — nor affiliated with one. No application is taken here. No loan terms are offered or negotiated here. No rate is quoted, no pre-approval issued, no appraisal ordered, nothing underwritten, no credit approved or refused, no loan closed. Every one of those sits with the licensed lender and stays put.

Read nothing on these pages as an offer of a loan, as a rate quote, as a pre-qualification or pre-approval, as a commitment to lend, or as an application. Whether a loan happens at all rests on the lender's own approval, the lender's own program rules and the lender's own disclosures.

How we are paid, and what that does not buy

What a lender buys is marketing and technology: this website, the local research inside it, the search work that puts it in front of anybody, the phone line and whatever answers it, and the reporting attached to all of that. You are never billed, at any stage, for anything. The amount is fixed against that work — it does not scale with the size of a loan, shift with a rate, follow the fees on a settlement sheet, or hang on a settlement happening.

Four commitments come out of that arrangement, and they carry more weight than the paragraph above them:

• Payment is not a routing input and never becomes one. What decides where an inquiry goes: the lender's license and the ground it actually works, the sort of loan described, the property, whether anybody is free to pick up the phone, and above all anything you said you wanted. The reason gets written down each time.
• Placement, ranking and preferred position are not for sale on this site, and no amount of money buys a lender a sentence here calling it the better one.
• A neutral comparison service is not what this is, and neither is a shopping engine or a marketplace; nobody here will pretend otherwise.
• It costs nothing to use and binds you to nothing afterwards. Hang up mid-sentence, let the callback ring out, or walk into a bank on Main Street in Norristown instead.

The numbers on these pages

Millage, transfer tax, loan limits, grant amounts, market figures: all of it comes out of public records, and all of it was right on the day it was read, with roughly that day printed beside it. Numbers like these move, usually without an announcement, and in this county several of them move again at the township line. Check one with the lender or with the office that administers the program before a decision rests on it. The calculators do their arithmetic in your browser, they produce estimates for planning and nothing sturdier, and an estimate is not a rate quote and not an offer of credit.

None of this is advice

These pages describe how programs work in the general case. About your particular situation they are not financial advice, not legal advice, not tax advice and not credit advice, and reading one puts nobody here into an advisory role. That role belongs to a licensed lender, or to an attorney, or to an accountant. The first of the three is the one a call to this number can reach.

What you are agreeing to

Agreement to be contacted happens in two places: the box beside the form, and the permission read out on the line. Who that covers, which channels it opens, and every route back out of it are laid out on communications consent. The privacy policy handles the other question, which is what becomes of the information itself.

What we ask of you

Be 18 or older. Hand over a phone number and an email address that are actually yours to hand over. Keep what you say true, as best you know it to be. Somebody else's details do not belong in the form, nor does anything you would rather a lender never read, and the form is for a genuine mortgage question rather than for anything else. Scraping, bulk copying, probing, flooding or otherwise poking at this site gets the access shut off.

What we keep

Every inquiry leaves a record behind it: the consent sentence word for word as it appeared, its version number, the minute, the page it came off, and the lender it was sent to. Where the law permits, the recording and the transcript are kept as well. The reason is twofold — the law expects a company in this position to be able to produce proof of an agreement, and when somebody asks why a mortgage lender rang them, a file is the only answer worth giving. Retention periods live in the privacy policy.

The site itself

Words, photographs, layout and code here are either ours or licensed for use. Each photograph's author and license sits on photo notes. Read a page, print it, mail it to whoever you like. Publishing one somewhere else under your own name is the one thing that is off.

Where a page links out — to a township office, a state program, a federal agency, a lender — the link is there because it is useful. What sits on the other end is not ours to control and not ours to answer for.

Limits, law, and what to do if something goes wrong

These pages come as they are. Nothing about them is warranted, expressly or by implication, and that covers accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, and whether the site is even up when you go looking for it. The acts, omissions, products, rates, fees and conduct of any lender introduced here are that lender's own; it is a separate business and it answers for its own work.

So far as Pennsylvania law permits, losses that are indirect, incidental, special or consequential are not ours to carry — not from reading these pages, not from a figure printed on one, not from a calculator, and not from an introduction that was made. Whatever the claim, one hundred dollars is the ceiling on what we owe. A jurisdiction that refuses a ceiling of that kind gets as much of it as it does allow.

When something here has gone wrong, start with the phone; most of it gets sorted inside a single call, and the contact page works too. These terms run on Pennsylvania law, its conflict-of-laws rules set aside, and a dispute that survives the phone call belongs to a state or federal court sitting in Pennsylvania. Any consumer protection right that cannot be signed away is not signed away by anything written here. These terms get updated from time to time, and whatever is current is what sits on this page, dated and numbered.