Mortgagematch.com, the loan origination website launched in late 2010 by Move Inc., is no longer pairing borrowers with loans and home listings.
The site originally included an automated pricing engine for the portfolio of loan products from Houston-based Cornerstone Mortgage Co., an online application and prequalification tool, as well as consumer-focused information and articles about mortgage-related topics.
Now, the site is a shell of its former self, only providing the articles, but not loan search or online application tools.
Mortgagematch.com experienced some early successes, including reaching nearly 100,000 unique visitors on the site and converting 1,000 of those hits to consumers completing the mortgage prequalification process in its first month of operation.
The site received a tremendous boost from another of Move’s online destinations, Realtor.com, which it operates on behalf of the National Association of Realtors. When a user searched for a loan on Mortgage Match, the site would populate ads for property listings from Realtor.com that matched the location and purchase price the potential borrower entered.
Likewise, users searching for properties on Realtor.com were inundated with ads for Mortgage Match—which drew the ire of some real estate professionals who felt that Move was promoting its mortgage business ahead of their own local relationships.
The partnership between Cornerstone and Move, and by proxy NAR, was seen as a potential boon for Cornerstone’s lending business. It’s unclear whether Move or Cornerstone terminated the Mortgage Match relationship—though of late, Cornerstone has been embroiled in its own controversy that may have lead to the partnership’s demise.
In June, the lender reached a settlement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development over discrimination allegations that it denied loans to women who were pregnant or on maternity leave.
Inman News, which first reported the changes on the Mortgage Match site, quotes Move spokesperson Julie Reynolds, who said the company intends to replace Cornerstone and resume its mortgage business.
When contacted by Mortgage Technology on Thursday, Reynolds declined to comment. "We’re not discussing the details of the relationship or the transition at this time," she said. Reynolds confirmed that she was interviewed by Inman, but would not say whether the report was accurate, nor why the company is now declining to comment.
On Wednesday, Manuel Valdes, a senior vice president at Cornerstone who works at the Mortgage Match division with his wife, Cornerstone division president Andrina Valdes, said he could not comment because of a mutual agreement that neither Move nor Cornerstone will comment about Mortgage Match without first seeking approval from the other company—though he added that he was unaware of the Move spokesperson’s comments.
“We can’t give any comment or anything unless we get approval from the partner; and it goes both ways for them,” Valdes said. “It would really surprise me that they would break a contract like that. I don’t know if they did. I haven’t seen it whatsoever.”
Move operates the site and controls the URL, but it was a Cornerstone subsidiary doing business as Mortgage Match that actually underwrote and funded the loans.
As real estate agent and online marketing consultant Mark Madsen put it in February, “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.
“It’s a great business move for the people that put the deal together,” he added. “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.”
“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.”
