Comparison-Shopping Sites Are Most Popular
Dozens of Web sites are devoted to financing home purchases, but they vary by type. Sites such as Mortgage.com or Countrywide’s Web site offer loans from a specific lender. Other sites--LendingTree and GetSmart, for example--gather information from consumers and then have lenders contact borrowers.
Among the most useful and popular mortgage loan sites are those that allow consumers to compare rates from various lenders without having to visit each lender’s Web site. Once they’ve done some comparison shopping, borrowers apply online for specific loans at these “shopping sites” and are usually assigned a loan counselor to help them until the loan closes.
The four most prominent mortgage comparison-shopping sites are E-Loan, QuickenMortgage, IOwn and Microsoft’s HomeAdvisor.
Like its competitors, E-Loan offers home purchase, refinance and equity loans and provides plenty of information for the uninitiated. But E-Loan’s “Home Finance 101” page is a collection of paragraphs arranged in such an oddly stair-stepped shape that one might consider staying a renter rather than try navigating this page.
E-Loan offers products from more than 70 lenders, but when a borrower is comparing loans, the site doesn’t reveal the name of the lenders upfront. Other niggling mysteries include the lack of a “home” button to return to the site’s first page, and a hard-to-access glossary.
On the plus side, by using E-Loan you can check on the status of your loan any time online, a feature not available on all sites.
Despite its pea-green color scheme, Quicken is legible and well-organized, is the only of the four sites to offer VA and FHA loans, and provides the borrower upfront with the names and contact information for all participating lenders.
One of many practical aspects of Quicken for the novice mortgage shopper is that if you only complete part of an online process, such as the loan search interview, the site remembers where you were in the process and allows you to pick up where you left off.
The IOwn site also saves the data you’ve entered between visits, plus it allows you to check your loan status any time. Using IOwn, you can easily plug in a set of financial assumptions (your planned down payment, etc.) and compare side-by-side what you’d pay for a 30-year-fixed versus a variety of other loan types.
If only the type weren’t so small, a would-be buyer could happily spend hours viewing possible loan scenarios here.
HomeAdvisor has features similar to the other sites, but you can also view homes for sale here.
Most HomeAdvisor pages are peppered with links to informational articles and decision-making tools such as “rent vs. buy” and refinancing calculators.
HomeAdvisor claims its online pre-approval form takes only 15 minutes to complete, but that’s only if you can get to the site. On a recent afternoon, that site was unreachable for more than an hour.
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Mortgages
Web sites reviewed: E-Loan: https://www.eloan.com; QuickenMortgage: https://www.quickenmortgage.com; IOwn: https://www.iown.com; HomeAdvisor: https://homeadvisor.msn.com.
