Torturing My Boss With Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace

If you are in the process of shopping for a mortgage and have used Zillow’s mortgage marketplace to get a quote…

Give yourself a gold star. You are probably going to save a bunch of money when you refinance your mortgage.

Not knowing anything about you individually, any one (or all) of these things may be true about you:

• You sat in the front of the class in high-school and mostly paid attention to what the teacher was saying.
• You have been known to buy things on sale.
• You realize that most things in life are negotiable.., and at least one person has mentioned to you that you are a good negotiator.
• You are fairly adept at using the web and know what a blog is.
• You actually have a decent idea of what your total net worth is - within a decimal place.
• You don’t currently have a loan officer that you have worked with in the past - they are no longer in the business… so you are searching for one.
• You love to torture people.

Did you like that last one?

Keep reading.

Believe it or not, by so many people being excited to use Zillow’s mortgage marketplace and inputting their information to get mortgage quotes - Today was my first day using the Mortgage Marketplace as a lender and I got to torture my boss today.

And it was fun.

How Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace Puts You In Control

When you go into Zillow’s mortgage marketplace and input your information, all of the sudden you will have loan officers coming out of the woodwork to compete for your loan. Many times, you will get more than 20 quotes in 10 minutes.

Heck, I saw a few in there today that had 40 quotes within 10 minutes.

The only thing that we as lenders see is all of the relevant “numbers” about your file - none of your personal information. Then each individual loan officer just has to decide how hard they want to work for how much money they could possibly make if you chose that loan officer to help you with your mortgage.

How I Tortured My Boss With Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace

Because of the way that the Mortgage Marketplace works, it really is almost impossible to hide if you are a lender. Most of the old mortgage tricks don’t work and each lender on there has to shoot straight and be competitive. Since today was my first day using Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, I input the first set of quotes as I would normally quote someone if they called me and asked me to quote them a loan.

Was I even in the ballpark when I quoted on ZMM using my “normal” quoting methods?

Nope.

Not even close.

So rather than just keep repeating the insanity… and quoting higher than all of the other lenders who are currently quoting, guess what I did? I went to my boss and showed him the numbers, because after all — numbers don’t lie.

I sat down and showed my boss what everyone else was charging and told him what we would have to cut our fees to in order to become competitive - and I thought I was going to watch a 47-year-old, grown-man break down and cry.

He stuttered.

He started breathing heavily.

His eyes started watering slightly — or at least became glossy like he had just taken a foul ball off the toe.

He put his hands on his head and leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

And then he leaned forward and said “do what you have to do in order to be competitive.”

Which means if you meet me through Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace, you can expect to save about 50% of what someone is going to pay who meets me some other way.

See you soon.

March 31, 2009