The Zillow Mortgage Marketplace (ZMM) is rich in interesting consumer data. ZMM receives more than 300,000 loan requests each month from borrowers, who can anonymously request mortgage quotes from hundreds of lenders across the country. Lenders then submit loan quotes customized to each borrower’s financial situation. On average, each request receives about fourteen customized quotes. So, this gives us a lot of data about who gets offered which kinds of rates. Armed with this data, we thought it would be cool to better illustrate how your credit score and loan-to-value (LTV) ratio influence the annual percentage rate (APR) that lenders are willing to give to you (see associated analysis on Zillow Blog). The visualization below shows a matrix of credit score by LTV and, within each cell, the average lowest APR offered to consumers matching those criteria. Below the matrix is a second graph that displays the typical characteristics of these consumers. Click on either a cell, a column heading or a row heading to see the associated metrics for matching consumers.

Let’s look at two different buyer profiles: Joe and Linda. Linda has 20% to put down on a house and has a credit score between 700 and 719. Joe also has 20% to put down, but his credit score is a bit lower — between 680 and 699. As you can see in the visualization below, at 80% Linda has been seeing rates quoted at 4.42% APR while Joe is receiving quotes for 4.52% APR. This 0.10% difference in APR translates into Linda saving $10,000 in interest costs over the life of the loan compared to Joe for a 30-year fixed-rate loan on a $300,000 home with 20% down payment.

Again, note that when you click on each of these squares in the matrix below, it will highlight the corresponding buyer profile below as well and recalculate and highlight the relevant data based on your current selection. Now we can see that the average Joe (sorry, had to…) makes about $20k a year less than Linda. He’s also likely looking for a house at an average value around $291,000 while Linda can splurge a bit more for the $320,000 house.

Feel free to interact with the graphs below and click on a square relevant to your scenario to see if you match our average buyer profile. Notice the sharp difference in rates as you get above 85% LTV and when your credit score hits 720. To play with more complex mortgage scenarios than those for Joe and Linda, check out one of the mortgage calculators in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace or check our personalized mortgage quotes for yourself in the Marketplace.

Methodology notes:
All data is collected from Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace. Blank squares did not receive enough loan quotes to be deemed statistically significant. This is also the case with LTVs below 70 and credit scores below 620. All quotes are for traditional 30-year fixed rate purchase mortgages between September 1-22, 2010 for homes intended as primary residences. APRs are calculated by first taking the minimum APR quote made for each request that met all of the preceding requirements and then computing the average of these lowest individual APR quotes across all consumers with a given combination of credit score and LTV. Note: Normally we have 3 buckets above 720, but for our purposes here they all behave very similarly. 720 appears to be a “magic number” beyond which you are unlikely to receive better rates from lenders (thus, they are grouped together here for visual simplicity).

Photo of Monopoly pieces courtesy of Flickr.