Zillow Mortgage Marketplace: When You Are Explaining You Are Losing

If you have shopped for a mortgage in the last 20 years, chances are that you know what it feels like to walk into a gunfight with a knife.

In negotiations, knowledge is power and until the recent launch of the Zillow mortgage marketplace, it was all too hard to get enough information to find yourself with enough leverage to get the best deal on a mortgage.

But that has now changed - and as I recently promised when talking about the First Rule of Negotiation, here is how Zillow’s mortgage marketplace puts you on the right side of the Second Rule of Negotiation.

The Second Rule of Negotiation is: When you are explaining, you are losing.

In any negotiation, there is a time to talk and a time to listen. The best negotiators spend more time listening than talking. The rookie, all-to-eager-salesman spends far more time talking than he does listening. When the best negotiators do talk, it is usually concise and addresses the concerns of the other party.

Generally speaking, great negotiators will follow a simple rule introduced by Stephen Covey:

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”

If you shop for a mortgage and choose NOT to use Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, chances are that you will call a loan officer, and immediately start “explaining” your situation.

What you don’t realize is that while you are “explaining” your current situation, any loan officer who is worth his salt is sizing you up and figuring out if you are really something that he can deal with and make money on — and even sizing up the amount of effort your situation will require and how much money he stands to make.

Within the first 5 minutes on the first call with you, good loan officers can tell if you are going to be a great deal for them (low effort, high dollars) or a bad deal for them (high effort, low dollars) and it all comes from things that you are explaining when speaking about your situation that have nothing to do with numbers.

When you are explaining, you are losing.

Now, if you shop for a mortgage using the Zillow mortgage marketplace, the tables are completely turned. You simply fill out the vital numbers of your situation and then the loan officers get to “explain” why you should choose them as well as submit their best offer.

Then - when you are not feeling pressure or rushed or have that “somehow I just got sold something” feeling, you decide which loan officer you want to contact about your mortgage.

Remember, when you submit your information to Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace, the lenders don’t get to see all of the “other” things about you - just your vital numbers that they really need to know. We don’t get to see your personal information and we have no way of knowing who you are or how to contact you.

Which leads into the Third Rule of Negotiation.

And lucky for you, using Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace puts you on the right side of that one too.

Up next, find out how the Third Rule of Negotiation applies to dating AND shopping for mortgages. Zillow has your covered when shopping for mortgages, but you are on your own when it comes to dating.

May 22, 2009