Financing - how many comparison offers?

Hello,

what is the best way to proceed with financing? How did you do it? How many comparison offers should one obtain and if one wants to go directly to banks, which ones are worthwhile?

Our house bank is comdirect. So we have no branch bank.

Comdirect acts as an intermediary like Interhyp and Dr. Klein. So we obtained offers from these three intermediaries.

We only want to pay off over 15 years. A residual debt of slightly over 100,000 remains. I don’t know the exact amount offhand. But that’s fine. We are taking a loan of 60% of the house purchase price.

We now have an offer through Interhyp:

0.75% nominal interest rate, 0.77% effective interest rate
15 years
5% special repayment per year, total repayment option 3 times

I think that sounds pretty good.

I wonder if it is still worth going to branch banks and if so, which ones?

Feel free to write about your approach and how many offers you obtained.

My approach and roughly my order:
- Main bank
- Interhyp
- A personally recommended financial broker, through whom all colleagues got the cheapest offer
- 2nd regional bank
- Check24 (purely out of curiosity, result identical to Interhyp)
- A church-affiliated specialist bank, where I still had an old account open from the past. They almost had the best conditions as well.

It ended up being the red main bank. "Long-term customer? We can still do something with the conditions. I’ll ask the board."

Sounds like a lot, but at the end of the list it goes really fast if you can skip the explanations of what an annuity loan is and know exactly what you want and have all documents ready.

Definitely include at least one large regional branch bank, even if you’re not a customer there, and an intermediary in addition to your main bank.

"Long-term customer? We can still do something with the conditions. I'll ask the board."

Sounds a bit like buying a kitchen. However, one should keep in mind how small the differences (in EUR/year) sometimes are, so I wouldn't exaggerate when comparing, even if being stingy is cool. Whether I inquire at Interhyp, Dr. Klein, or Starpool probably doesn't make a difference.

So we went to Interhyp, Dr. Klein, and a financial broker who has his office nearby and whom I found through Google.

After the first appointment with detailed advice, you usually already have a fairly good idea of what exactly you want. So the further appointments don’t take quite as long. It was interesting that the same banks were at the top with all the intermediaries, but the interest rates were very different.

In the end, we closed with Interhyp because it was both the cheapest and by far the best advice. However, we believe that since the advisor can somewhat control his commission, this worked to our advantage. Because as we found out at our appointment, we recognized each other since he lives with his family in the neighboring street about 100m away.
I can’t explain it otherwise that the interest rates were almost 1% lower than with the other two.

Moreover, the interest rate improved slightly for us again after signing. I don’t think this change had to be passed on to us, as we signed under different conditions. But he did.

The 3 different brokers also had the same banks at the top of the list with us and different offers. So it is worth going to several brokers. I just don't know if the branch banks can keep up if you go to them. I can't really check out a dozen for time reasons.

If all the intermediaries are indeed accessing the same portal, how can interest rate differences arise with the same parameters?