Loan Refinance

Refinancing swaps your existing home loan for a new one, usually to lock in a better rate, shorten or extend the loan term, or pull equity out of the home. It's a smaller transaction than a purchase in some ways since there's no buyer or seller to coordinate, but the money still has to move in a very specific order for everything to work.

Once your lender approves the refinance and opens escrow, our job is to request a payoff statement from your current lender, confirm the exact amount owed as of the closing date, and hold the new loan funds until we're ready to pay off the old loan and record the new deed of trust. Get that sequence wrong and you could end up with two active liens on the property, or a gap where the old loan hasn't actually been paid off yet.

Because a refinance usually happens directly between you and your lender, most homeowners never think about escrow until something feels off, like a payoff amount that doesn't match what they expected. Our role is to catch that kind of discrepancy before it becomes a problem, not after the funds have already moved.