The Problem With Internet Mortgage Shopping
So you’ve finally decided it’s time to make an offer on that house or refinance the one you own. You heard the internet is a great place to shop for a mortgage. So you log on and pull up Google, Yahoo or MSN and you type in “mortgage”.
The first thing you notice on Google is that there are one hundred and forty seven million results for the term mortgage. So you try to narrow it down some by entering “mortgage Connecticut” (or whatever state you live in). Great now you have narrowed it down to 2.147 million results (as of 2005, Connecticut had a population of 3.5 million people). So you just forge ahead and examine the first 30 or so results.
Out of the first thirty results, only one link is to a mortgage company. The other twenty nine links are to mortgage portals that shoot your application to multilple lenders and informational sites like freddiemac and wikipedia. Over to the right you have paid listings. Out of the eight, five are mortgage portals.
So you have the choice of choosing the one lender listed in my search, it was Countrywide or you can try one of the mortgage portals. Of course you can always search more but internet mortgage shopping was supposed to be easy. And why not use a portal? What’s wrong with filling out one application online and have three or four lenders compete for your business?
These mortgage portal sites are in essence mortgage referral websites. The sites don’t provide the loan. The company or companies they forward your mortgage application to provides the loan. To make it worse, you don’t even know who they are going to refer you to. Which is the equivalent of opening the yellow pages and covering your eyes and pointing to the page to pick a company to call.
To me, that is not how I want to shop for anything, including a mortgage. When I shop for a car, I go to dealerships. When I buy clothes, I go to the mall or pull up a website like Landsend.com. If I’m buying groceries, I go to the supermarket. I don’t go to a website and seek out a shopping service. I go straight to the source. That is how shopping for a mortgage on the internet should be too.
I’m not knocking mortgage portals or informational websites. Sites like freddiemac’s and some of the better portals provide a ton of information resources. If you are really into convenience and so much so you are willing to give up control of the shopping experience, then a mortgage referral website is a great place to go.
I don’t know about you but when I shop, I want to deal directly with the entity that is actually providing the product or service I am seeking. When shopping for a mortgage on the internet, be aware of who you are dealing with. Is the website a mortgage referral site or is it the actual website of the mortgage company? Knowing the difference can save you a lot of time and aggravation.