The major downside of using them as opposed to bank staff is that they themselves do not have access to the funds you're requesting. If funding is required as an emergency, then approaching a bank or lender's staff directly is probably the best option. Still this is not necessarily the case. Bank staff have, on average, less experience and may have a large number of clients and other work to deal with as well as a long chain of hierarchy and bureaucracy to work through. Home local home refinance, on the other hand, prepare everything for the bank ahead of time and present it directly to a bank official, allowing them to skip certain members of the bank hierarchy and get to a simple decision.