It’s been more than three months since Move Inc. launched its mortgage origination website Mortgagematch.com and already the site has seen some early success in attracting visitors. But it also has it has renewed debate about the role of online mortgage “shopping” tools that are both lead generators and lending portals.
Move partnered with Houston-based nonbank lender Cornerstone Mortgage for the website, which launched in late November. Move operates the Mortgage Match site, but it’s a Cornerstone subsidiary doing business as Mortgage Match that actually underwrites and funds the loans. The Mortgage Match site exclusively offers Cornerstone Mortgage’s lending services, though it does provide multiple products from its warehouse lending, internal funds and correspondent relationships with multiple large lenders.
Move populates Mortgage Match with real estate advertising—targeted property listings from Realtor.com, a site it also operates on behalf of the National Association of Realtors. In the first month online, Mortgagematch.com had nearly 100,000 unique visitors on the site and converted 1,000 of those hits to a consumer completing the mortgage prequalification process.
Under its model at press time, property listings in multiple listing services that are controlled by local Realtor associations are automatically fed into Realtor.com’s online listings. The real estate broker gets the firm’s listings published online for free, but has to pay Move to advertise them in more prominent locations on the site.
(Consumer credit reporting agency Equifax also uses the Mortgage Match name for an online search service, Equifax Mortgage Match, that collects borrower information online and presents up to four product and pricing offers from lenders. But the two services should not be confused as they play different roles—the Equifax site is not involved in real estate search, Sue Stewart, senior vice president of Move, told Origination News. An Equifax spokesperson acknowledged the similar branding between the two services, but declined to comment. At press time there appeared to be no current or active trademark of the Mortgage Match name.)
The Mortgage Match model is in contrast to some others in the space that say they offer rate quotes more directly from multiple lenders based on user-inputted parameters. The services double as a lead generator for lenders, who pay to advertise their rates. There is at least one instance in which one of these, albeit several years ago, had to face concerns about possible unequal treatment of lenders related to what at the time was its plan to acquire one.
And some real estate brokers at a recent New York conference complained to one of Mortgage Match’s executives about some concerns linked to its configuration. Property listings are collected in multiple listing services that are controlled by local Realtor associations and automatically fed into Realtor.com’s online listings. The real estate broker gets the firm’s listings published online for free, but has to pay Move to advertise them in more prominent locations on the site—an arrangement many bemoaned to Errol Samuelson, Move’s chief revenue officer and the president of Realtor.com and others at the real estate conference because they believe it’s an arrangement that doesn’t treat all members equally on NAR’s own website.
The brokers were concerned that populating Mortgagematch.com with real estate listings from Realtor.com—and vice versa, putting Cornerstone’s Mortgage Match advertising on Realtor.com—creates a connection between Cornerstone and NAR that gives Mortgage Match an implicit backing from trade association and may interfere with local real estate professionals’ referral business with other mortgage bankers and brokers.
One concerned professional is Mark Madsen. Madsen is a licensed real estate agent and is responsible for the marketing and Web media duties for a Las Vegas real estate brokerage. In addition, he runs a blog about the mortgage industry, which serves as a marketing arm for an unrelated mortgage brokerage.
Madsen said he’s concerned about the new competition from Move and the implications the cross-promoting between the two sites has on real estate agents.
“It’s a great business move for the people that put the deal together,” he said. “I don’t know whether agents listing their properties on Realtor.com are happy about their properties being used to generate mortgage leads for a company that they may or may not endorse.”
Andrina Valdes, division president of Mortgage Match and the head of both Cornerstone’s strategic partnerships and direct-to-consumer units (including mortgage-marketing arrangements with homebuilders and real estate brokerages), believes the site gives borrowers with competitive access to multiple lenders because Cornerstone offers both mortgage products funded by its warehouse lines of credit and others funded by its correspondent lending operation, even though it is a transaction that Cornerstone controls.
“In our situation, you have the same benefit of multiple lenders. The buyer gets to choose the best product and rate from our search engine and that’s what we underwrite the program to and that’s where we sell the loan to,” she said.
When a user first searches for mortgages on the website, the results do not specify the funding lender or intended secondary market purchaser. “When they talk to our loan officers, at that point of time is when they can differentiate if they want a specific lender or not,” Valdes said.
Samuelson said the difference between Mortgage Match and other mortgage searches is that borrowers can get further into the mortgage process than they can with the other sites.
“We’re trying to market this idea of a pajama mortgage,” he told Origination News in an interview following his appearance at the conference. “Where you can sit in your pajamas on a Sunday morning and literally in 10 to 15 minutes, not just get an estimate, but actually get a commitment from a lender and do the whole thing online.”
The site’s launch comes after two years of research Move conducted with both consumers and real estate brokers. Samuelson said there is an unmet need online for consumer mortgage education. For that reason, Samuelson said, Mortgage Match includes Web pages with answers to various mortgage-related questions.
“If we do this right, we think this significantly reduces the friction for the first time homebuyer and has some potential to, in the best-case scenario, actually expand the market,” Samuelson said.
Valdes said the relationship her company has is with Move alone and rejected the perception that the Realtor advertising on Mortgage Match links NAR with Cornerstone.
“We don’t have a formal partnership with NAR. We never have,” she said. “We have no relationship with anyone other than Move. If you go onto Realtor.com right now, there’s a number of advertisers on the website that I’m sure do not have an affiliation with NAR either.”
But Madsen took exception to those assertions because of the impact the Realtor website has on directing Web traffic to the new site. When one site links to another, search engines like Google consider that a vote for site, called a backlink. The more backlinks a site has, the higher it appears in search results, what Madsen calls “link juice.” It’s the most important of the more than 200 factors Google uses to rank search results.
“If Move Inc. or Realtor.com is embedding backlinks within their site to promote some of these other entities they say aren’t necessarily a partner, yet they’re giving them link juice, that’s big time,” Madsen said. “I would give an arm for a link from a site like Realtor.com, that would have a significant impact on our rankings and our traffic.”
Sites like Facebook and Twitter insert a code to instruct search engines to not count links in groups and tweets in search rankings. Realtor.com uses these “nofollow” codes on some of its links, which among other uses, are applied to property listing Web pages and external advertisers for consumer credit reporting services.
But many links throughout the Realtor.com site to Mortgagematch.com don’t have nofollow tags. Using a tool called a site explorer, Origination News found that in mid-February, MortgageMatch.com had more than 563,000 links coming into its site. The site explorer ranked a link from Realtor.com as Mortgage Match’s highest-quality link and four other Realtor.com links were also in the site’s top 10.
“It’s an argument of implicit versus explicit endorsement,” Madsen said. “If there are any links that Cornerstone or Mortgage Match are gaining SEO value from as a result of these various relationships, then that’s a direct endorsement.”
Samuelson said the type of cross-promotion of home listings on Mortgagematch.com and mortgage products on Realtor.com is commonplace for real estate websites. He added that real estate brokers with established preferred mortgage lender relationships can choose to opt-out their listings from relevant Mortgage Match advertising.
“The other websites will put mortgage ads directly on listing pages of all brokers and there are instances where those ads compete with the broker’s mortgage relationships,” he said. “The brokers who have relationships with mortgage companies, we’re not putting the advertising on their listings.”
For its part, a NAR spokesperson said the group has no complaints over the arrangement. “Right now, NAR is happy with the amount of consumer traffic that Mortgage Match is driving to the listings on Realtor.com,” said NAR spokesperson Lucien Salvant.
And Salvant added the association—which boasts a membership of one million real estate agents, brokers and other industry participants—doesn’t see the cross-promotion as giving Mortgagematch.com or Cornerstone its backing, nor does it take away from the agents who have established referral business with local mortgage professionals.
“We don’t see it that way at all. It’s a Move product and Move operates the [Mortgage Match] site. Realtor.com is our site,” he said.
“A broker is not supposed to recommend one mortgage company; we advise at least three. It’s a consumer choice, not a Realtor choice,” Salvant added. “If a consumer asks a Realtor to advise them, the Realtor should give them choices.”
Samuelson said the end goal is not for Web users to be directed to Mortgage Match from Realtor.com, but rather to use the mortgage website, get pre-approved by Cornerstone and then be directed to Realtor.com, where they can connect with an agent or brokerage to begin their home buying search.
“Our goal is over time—and it’s going to take time to build the brand—to build this brand around this completely transparent pre-approval in a nonthreatening and educational way to get a mortgage,” Samuelson said. “Once you’re qualified, we’ll take you back to Realtor.com and now agents can actually work with you because you know what you can afford.”
