What’s reasonable to expect from lender?

Hoping folks can help me understand what we should expect from a lender before being in contract. We’re in the early stages of the home-buying process, signed with an agent, have pre-approval from a lender, looking at homes and just this weekend even explored putting an offer on one.

The lender we’ve been working with (not the one our agent recommended) has been…. not at all what I was expecting. But then, I wonder, am I expecting too much?

At first, lender seemed great. Did pre-approval and showed us an online portal with scenarios for different mortgage amounts/DPs. Even then, though, I had a bad feeling: I asked questions about the closing costs breakdown (which things are static, which variable, and which go to his org vs other entities?) and he seemed either unable or unwilling to even comprehend my questions. It was very odd.

In that meeting, he kept saying he couldn’t really give more specific numbers until we had an address for a place we hoped to put an offer on, and at that point he’d work with that and give us very specific projections. Okay, I guess I’ll take that on faith and hope it works out when we need that. He also assured us he would be available on weekends, and if he was away from his computer, it wouldn’t take him long to get to it to run some numbers for us.

This weekend, we asked for those numbers for a specific property. He did update his online portal, but with a wrong zip code, and never responded to our questions like “hey this isn’t the zip code we asked for, will that matter?” Over the weekend, I realized his projected property taxes were way below the even what the current owner is paying (looked it up on county auditor’s site). So, we messaged asking, “Hey, we’re confused by these numbers. Here’s what we’re seeing, did we miss something?” He proceeded to almost interrogate us, asking for screenshots and everything, only to….essentially say “sorry I’m not by my computer. The taxes will be updated after the sale and then you’ll know.” Um, yes, I know, but I wanted some accurate baseline figures to gauge how high we could offer on THIS house, which we need to do before Monday AM.

He didn’t even follow up the next morning with those figures.

Our realtors keep telling us “your lender should be doing X and Y with you,” usually things our lender didn’t bring up at all or barely glossed over (things like how we can project what would happen to our numbers if we take from the DP to waive the appraisal gap contingency up to a certain amount).

I’m just so confused about this process. Are we expecting too much before we’re in contract? Are the realtors setting unrealistic expectations? Or did this lender drop the ball here?

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts!