Not so much, according to this story in the Boston Herald. Excerpt:
[Apparently [buyers are] not [using the disclosures] so much. Bill Emerson, chief executive of Quicken Loans, the country’s second highest volume mortgage lender, says his firm is seeing no surge in shopping by applicants using the Loan Estimate. “I don’t think consumers are changing the way they shop simply because” they have a new tool to do so, Emerson said in an interview. * * *
Paul Skeens, president of Colonial Mortgage Group in Waldorf, Md., says barely 5 percent of his clients are using the Loan Estimate to comparison shop, while 95 percent “are doing it the old way.” Seattle area mortgage banker Charley Murphey told me he has “heard of no borrowers walking away with a Loan Estimate in hand to go shopping for a better deal.’’
Joe Adamaitis, vice president and residential lending manager for Insignia Bank in Sarasota, Fla., says “buyers do not have the time to shop due to the pressures of meeting commitment and closing dates. Most lenders are priced the same and it comes down to which lender the Realtor referred them to.”
* * *
For its part, the CFPB is taking the long view and recognizes that changing consumer behavior takes time. * * *
FWIW, as someone’s who has been house-hunting, I found that rates were more negotiable than I had realized. I’ve used the CFPB’s tool, but not in the way that the folks in this story suggest. In other words, I never talked to potential lenders to say “the CFPB’s loan estimator suggests you’re charging me too much.” Instead, I looked at the estimator, talked with various lenders and then brought the best estimate back to the others and asked them to beat it.