Zillow launched a new online mortgage quote system today at their Mortgage Marketplace. Must give credit to The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson for blogging about this first.
From Jay: Zillow’s system does not take your name, phone number, email or Social Security Number. Lenders get your request and respond with a detailed loan quote based on information you provide. You then log into Zillow and review the loan quote — which includes rate, APR, terms and cost. Then YOU decide if you want to contact the lender.
How in the world can a lender give you a mortgage quote if they don’t know your credit score?!? Zillow thought of that. Users provide an estimate of their credit score, or use Zillow’s FICO estimator tool if they don’t know their actual score. Zillow then provide users a loan quote that includes rate, APR, terms and cost.
IÂ don’t normally think much of Zillow, but this seems kinda cool. Kinda like the promise of eLoan without the annoying dinnertime telemarketer calls.
Heather Barr is a Realtor and a happy workaholic. She eats more than someone her size ought to be able, and is a runner as a consequence. Her TiVo's full of spy thrillers, police procedurals and Whedonesque sci-fi.
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Shailesh, I agree. I also wanted to add to this post by saying that I’m pushing buyers harder these days to use a lender I know. My colleague Sharane Dorrah has a fabulous way of explaining this: “There are going to be about a dozen people involved in your home purchase, and I have ‘pull’ with most of them. If something goes wrong at the title office, or with the home inspection, I can contact my people and make things right quickly. But there are 2 people I can’t control: the sellers (and their agent) and a lender I don’t know. But if you get your home loan from then I know I have pull with him/her. I can call and they’ll fix things quickly if we start to have problems.”
With the lending landscape still changing daily, it’s vital that a buyer choose a lender who’s on top of it all, and works full time in the biz. I actually would discourage a buyer from using an online lender if I could, because of the potential problems an unkown lender could cause. Lender messed up the docs? Bam! Your closing is now delayed by maybe up to 2 weeks. Ouch!
The estimated FICO score part makes me nervous. But allowing the borrower to “guess” their own score is worse.
Nice info, added to favourites.