Mortgage Shopping, Incognito
Sites Require Fewer Personal Details to Generate Quotes
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Saturday, August 23, 2008; Page F09
LOS ANGELES -- Even though mortgage lenders have raised the bar on what it takes to qualify for a home loan, shopping for a loan online has gotten easier, if not necessarily less confusing.
Where mortgage-scouting Web sites traditionally required users to enter personal information to generate rate estimates, the newest sites offer a way to comparison shop for a loan under a blanket of anonymity.
This can help allay concerns about turning over personal information online or being hounded for weeks by mortgage lenders soliciting business.
But do these rates hold up once names, credit scores and other personal details enter the picture?
"My gut instinct is that there will be a wide disparity about what rates are quoted on these sites and what they actually end up with, and not necessarily due to the borrower," said Robert Statnick, chairman of the California Mortgage Bankers Association. "All the sites may not collect all the data that's necessary to give an actual price quote."
The lenders do collect the data they need to figure out what to charge for a loan, but these sites have made it possible to delay that step to give a borrower time to shop incognito.
Zillow.com and Mortgage Marvel.com have embraced this concept in the past year, though that's where their similarities end.
Mortgage Marvel bills itself as the mortgage-shopping version of travel sites Orbitz or Expedia.
The site, which launched in the spring, is operated by Mortgagebot, a Milwaukee-based provider of online loan-origination technology for banks and other lenders.
Like the online travel sites, Mortgage Marvel lets users enter details on the kind of mortgage loan they need and the site rounds up real-time rate and lender fee quotes from hundreds of lenders.
The site boasts that users don't need to punch in personal details to get real rates instead of teaser rates used to bait visitors. The catch: Users must have a credit score of 720 or better.
Mortgage Marvel says it can make this claim because it's tapped directly into 250 banks and credit unions' automated loan pricing databases. (It gets a fee every time a user fills out an application with a lender on the site.)
