Home Mortgage category archives

Since it launched in April 2008, Zillow Mortgage Marketplace has offered borrowers a way to anonymously submit loan requests and receive an unlimited number of custom mortgage quotes with real rates directly from thousands of competing lenders.
Over time, we’ve added new features to enhance the loan shopping experience, including super-sexy mortgage rate charts, automated quotes, easy quote sorting and filtering [...]

Requests for purchase loan quotes were up 12% in June vs. May, and up 230% since the start of the year, signifying what could be good news in the number of people who are shopping for homes.  Zillow Mortgage Marketplace saw more than 32,000 requests for purchase loans in June versus just under 10,000 in [...]

Today, Zillow launched a new feature that automatically notifies you when mortgage rates reach your target rate.  Called “Mortgage Rate Alert,” this new e-mail helps those who are refinancing or purchasing a home know the optimal time to request mortgage quotes from lenders.  No need to continually check back for rates — this rate alert e-mail gives [...]

Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, the best place to shop for mortgages online, reached a significant milestone this week.   In less than a year, we passed one million mortgage quotes submitted to our marketplace, and counted more than 150,000 loan requests!

We are super excited about these numbers because it tells us customers value our:

Competitive mortgage rates
Accurate, custom [...]

This week, the Federal Reserve cut the “federal funds rate” from 1.5% to 1% and the “discount rate” from 1.75% to 1.25%. What does this mean? Well the federal funds rate is the rate that banks lend money to other banks overnight. The discount rate is basically the interest rate that the Federal Reserve charges [...]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced this morning that the federal government will take responsibility for controlling and capitalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Watch the announcement on CNN). What were GSEs (government sponsored entities) are now GCEs (government controlled entities.) With tax payers and national debt underwriting the GCE’s loans, the goal is to restore [...]

I’ve always wanted to be a homeowner, however with all the doom and gloom these days about the current housing market,  I’ve found myself much less inclined to purchase a home than I had been previously.  At least that’s what I thought until I spent the weekend spiffing up my sister’s recently purchased home– talk about sibling [...]

There’s a whole lot of fascinating mortgage data from Deutsche Bank in this 56 page report.
A few selected graphs:
Delinquencies on Prime Fixed-Rate Mortgages, by FICO Score

As you might expect, prime fixed rate mortgages don’t frequently default. Also, notice the high correlation between FICO score and default rate.

Delinquencies on Alt-A Fixed-Rate Mortgages, by FICO Score

Look at how much [...]

In this crazy market, how are you supposed to keep up with — and help others keep up with — the latest mortgage rates? Well, now you don’t have to worry about it. We did the work for you — Zillow has created new mortgage rate widgets you can add to your own Web site [...]

Today, Zillow Mortgage Marketplace reached a couple of impressive milestones: more than 50,000 loan requests have been submitted, and more than 3,000 lenders responded to those requests with 250,000 loan quotes. All of this activity has taken place since the product’s launch on April 3 — just three months ago!

In addition to the previous feedback [...]