Five Star Escrow

It was rather confusing at the beginning since the escrow handler is more than one person (it is a team of four officers). However, as soon as I know who they are. It is a smooth sailing in opening and closing of the escrow. They did a good job.

Engaging.

As a buyer, I experienced 2 major issues with Five Star's handling of escrow/title. 1. From online searches, I'm finding that a common escrow fee in CA is that sellers and buyers are charged $250 each plus split 50/50 an escrow fee of $2 per $1,000... so for a 1M purchase price each side pays $2,250. However this company's escrow fee for buyers alone is $2.75 per thousand + $650, which comes out to $3,400 for the buyer. Meanwhile they give a discounted flat rates of $750 to sellers with repeat business. They claim the escrow fee IS being split 50/50... just with buyer paying full-price and seller getting a big discount 🤔. Including the other fees, I was charged $5,441 by Five Star for a 1.3M purchase. Five Star insists that their fees are "on par or lower than others." This is categorically untrue and they don't have any fee schedule document. 2. A couple days before closing I was the recipient of a fraud attempt. I received a scam email instructing me to wire funds to a criminal's bank account. The criminal posed as our Five Star escrow officer and knew the closing date and approximate wire amount. I can't know whose account was hacked for them to receive this information, but Five Star completely deflected the likely possibility that they have been compromised and claimed without evidence that it was MY email account that was hacked.

hard to communicate

Everyone at Five Star Escrow was great!

Five Star was very helpful throughout the process!

Five Star Escrow was excellent and very helpful throughout the escrow process. They made it clear and and were accessible for questions throughout. I would be happy to use their services again.

Communication was poor and did not put the customer first

Five Star Escrow is a great company to work with, everything was on time and no issues though the process. Strongly recommended.

responsive and professional

Very smooth process. Use of DocuSign was great.

I felt like the escrow company was not very clear about the status of the escrow balance, and I felt like I only got second hand information through my agent. I would have preferred more frequent and timely updates to the buyer balance sheet, because I had to frequently audit for mistakes or oversights. Their communication felt somewhat unprofessional at times.

Very responsive. Easy to work with. Escrow went very smoothly.

Don't have any other escrow agent to compare to. Closing went ok but I did not feel like I was fully informed as to what was going on. Example, homeowners insurance co. was not informed as to when the closing occurred. Five Star did work well with our NJ closing agent to transfer funds between the closings and that part went smoothly.

Jennifer Decker was responsive and helpful.

Very good escrow, went as planned and my answers where always answered.

Escrow docs are extremely tough to read through to the untrained eye, and my eyes are very much untrained. So, I relied on Jen Decker from Five Star Escrow to decipher things for me. She was very helpful on the multiple phone calls that I made asking about terminology or breaking down closing cost line items. I'm glad she was there to guide me!

Jennifer at Five Star Escrow was very easy to work with. She was very responsive to questions and even helped make a last minute correction to ensure our amount due at signing was completely accurate. Jennifer made sure everything worked smoothly and even helped to close our loan two days earlier than scheduled.

Our escrow officer was not in town a week before and a week after the closing. On the morning of closing date, I had difficulty to get wire information to send money. They were very friendly and willing to help, but the process was not managed as smoothly as I expected.