Three Things We Like about Zillow Mortgage

1. Power to the people. The consumer lead generation experience on the Internet is broken. Not many consumers want their phone to ring three times a day for seven days in a row from four different lenders when they submit their information on LendingTree or LowerMyBills. By making the lead anonymous to the lender, Zillow does a great thing by putting the power to request contact or to pick up the phone in the hands of the consumer. When the consumer does call a lender, you can bet that will be a very valuable phone call.

2. Transparency. We love, love, love the Loan Request Search. The ability to see what quotes consumers are requesting and how lenders are responding to those quotes is so smart. For our lender customers, we can easily see the lead flow in their sweets spots and see how much competition there is against those leads. Why doesn’t LendingTree do this? It would be valuable for both consumers and lenders.

3. Free leads. That is a very low cost trial for lenders and a very good strategy by Zillow to drive liquidity in their marketplace and to inflict pain on all the established lead providers in the industry. All it costs lenders is the time and energy required to quote the leads.

We haven’t read all the lender feedback on Zillow but Owen Raun from RMC has positive things to say. Read it here. I particularly like Owen’s suggestions for how to make the service better. Look for Zillow to provide an API to automate the submission of quotes for large lenders in the coming months.

Disclosure: I used to work with Rich and Lloyd at Expedia and I have a huge amount of respect for them and their team. Also, I have a very small investment in Zillow.