Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, Cultivating a Better Crop

May 21st, 2008 Categories: Mortgage News, Tranparent mortgage pricing

Since launching last month, Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace has grown quite respectably.  They’re already adding features as a result of listening to members of their community.

According to Nate Moch from the Zillow Blog:

Since launching Zillow Mortgage Marketplace a little over a month ago, we’ve received all sorts of recommendations and feedback from our users. We have been busy fixing a few things since then, but we’ve also recently added features the our lender community has asked for. We appreciate the great suggestions we’ve received and hope the new offerings we added will be useful tools for the 2,000+ lenders in the marketplace.

The improvements: a Quote Pre-fill, Loan Quote Flags, and Lender Leaderboard attempt to address some of the inefficiencies within the community, specifically the latency and accuracy of information from participating lenders and consumers.

Quote Pre-fill reduces redundant data entry for the mortgage professional making the act of filling multiple, similar consumer quote requests more efficient.

Loan Quote Flags allows the professional community to police itself from traditional mortgage gamesmanship by reporting obvious grievous actions.

Lender Leaderboard ranks professionals by the number and quality of reviews they’ve received.

The big Z has also begun to offer some nice intuitive calculators…

All in all, a positive direction for the community, though probably still not enough to increase the viability of the Marketplace to a point of an acceptable client pull through rate ratio, for the upper end professionals.

Zillow still has to markedly improve on a couple areas before they become a viable community for anonymous, transparent lending a.k.a. Mortgage 2.0:

Decreasing and normalizing the latency in information exchange between the consumer and professional.  ‘Vanilla quotes’ come back within an hour, but quote requests that deviate from the conforming norm take substantially longer or go unaddressed.  Both time frames are far from ideal.

‘Accurately and efficiently quoting a myriad a loan scenarios’ is an oxymoron.  With the market changing daily as far as product availability, a professional who’s not diligent in their research may misquote unintentionally and get flagged even though they were genuine in their actions.

Zillow is still completely beholden to their professional community to provide the most critical information, rate and price, in a truly transparent fashion.

IMHO the big Z is addressing this dynamic one step too late in the infochain-link:

Wholesale Market-Professional-Zillow-Consumer

Ideally:

Wholesale Market-Zillow-Professional-Consumer

would be far more effective, alas far more difficult to pull off…

Today Zillow is still closer to Bankrate 2.0 than Mortgage 2.0 (I’m throwing 2.0’s around here) but they’re trying hard and getting better, taking continued important steps to ultimately getting it right…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Mortgage News, Tranparent mortgage pricing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Mary
    Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for your post. I wanted to add that we recently conducted a survey with some of the first borrowers who received quotes on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, and they had some positive feedback.

    A couple of key numbers show that Zillow Mortgage Marketplace is working:
    More than 40% of borrowers contacted at least one lender, and 30% of borrowers have closed or plan to close a loan soon with a lender from Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.

    My recent blog post on Zillow Blog highlights the results: http://www.zillowblog.com/zillow-mortgage-marke...
  • It's definitely a step in the right direction for anonymous mortgage quotes for the consumer, but you're right, it's not a huge step from Bankrate.

    Zillow mortgage quotes are rough. At best they're going to be off by thousands (as much as 12-15k in certain scenarios). At worst, they'll be completely bogus because Zillow omits some key considerations on the consumer's data.

    In order for a mortgage site to break new 2.0 ground it has to be focused. Then it can perform precise calculations for specific types of loans. This is how it becomes a true benefit and personalized resource to the consumer. That's web 2.0 and a major step forward.
  • I noticed that lots of people are using the 2.0. Is there any special significance other then new jargon for the next generation? I am not sure I Old Mutual it.
  • Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for your encouragement.

    I agree that automation could have a real positive impact on quote accuracy and efficiency. We will implement an API to automate quotes but that interface will push loan requests and receive quotes; it won't integrate to wholesale rates. Zillow Mortgage Marketplace is not a pricing engine and I'm convinced that having a pricing engine should not be a prerequisite for participating in the marketplace. Remember too that not all quotes on Zillow originate in the wholesale market and so that's probably not the right interface for us when we do tackle automation (but it may well be the right approach for a partner who can provide a pricing engine for brokers that can integrate to Zillow.)
  • You're the best David, and I love your company's courage to innovate :)
  • Hey Nate -
    You forgot the scrolling live quotes and the daily average 30 Fixed Rates & 15 Year Fixed rates. That really helps a consumer get a feel on current market rates.

    I like that feature.
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