Announcing the “Mortgage Center” Plug-in for WordPress

We are pleased to unveil a new mortgage center plug-in that creates a mortgage center inside your WordPress blog.

This new Mortgage Center WordPress plug-in provides:

• real-time rates
• a monthly payment calculator
• closing cost estimates (courtesy of Closing.com)
• a few educational mortgage articles
• links to the latest blog posts from Mortgages Unzipped, Blown Mortgage, and Mortgage Reports.

Since buyers are looking for mortgage information and many agents and brokers have WordPress blogs, we thought this was the perfect plug-in for us to develop. We launched our first WordPress plug-in (Local Market Explorer) in August, and were thrilled with the great customization, feedback, and implementation - including early adopters Jay Thompson and Kris Berg. A couple quick notes regarding the details of the mortgage center plug-in:

• You can choose to display national mortgage rates (default) or rates for a specific state in the admin options
• Zillow co-branding can be utilized by saving your Zillow screen name in the admin options

We do have mortgage rate and mortgage calculator widgets if you’d prefer to take that route, but the ability to blend data into the look and feel of your blog is a big benefit in using a WordPress plug-in as opposed to a widget — for those running WordPress that is. If you’d like to customize the look and feel of mortgage rate information on your site, but do not use WordPress, take a look at our mortgage APIs.

We once again have to extend a huge thanks to Andrew Mattie (who has a day job with Diverse Solutions) for the time and effort he put into developing this plug-in for us.

If you want to see what “mortgage center” looks like, I’ve installed it on Geek Estate Blog. You can download the plug-in in the Wordpress plug-in directory.

As always, leave any feedback or suggestions in the comments below or in Zillow Advice.

We hope you like the new plug-in!