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Matt Kelly and I are live on the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.  We’ve got 5 others LO’s waiting for Zillow to approve them. 

Here are our first impressions.

• Seems to be a healthy amount of consumers requesting quotes so far.
• A bit cumbersome to navigate  – but that’s probably something we can get used to
• Will see if/when we get any response from these anonymous consumers – one so far
• We have submitted about 20 quotes so far.
• Only 2 other lender/loan officers other then us quoting – but it’s early.

For consumers, this is a good thing   Relatively accurate responses from somewhat qualified lenders without having to give out your emails/phone #’etc.  If you like to shop for cars on car lots and not have the sales guy walk out to greet you – this is great.

For loan officers, probably a good thing.  However, it could become your full time job to search requests, find one, quote it, find another, quote it, find another, quote it etc..  LO’s don’t get paid for quoting deals.  So will see how the consumer responds.  If you don’t like “tire-kickers” then I imagine you will get frustrated quickly and go back to what you were doing.

For Lender/managers, not really a good thing.  I manage a group of loan officers.  My concerns center on having leads distributed fairly, on a set schedule so I know consumers get accurate real time quotes as soon as possible.  Zillow doesn’t have a way for me to manage lead flow.  Also, it’s possible that 2 or more of my LO’s will “compete” for the same lead.  And, if/when this consumer responds and chooses one of our loan officers, I have no way of knowing if the referral source was Zillow or another source.  Which is important in our shop since LO’s have different pay structures for different sources. 

Also, I’m a bit concerned that the ease of “posting a comment” about a LO will get a bit ugly.  I hope not, but we all know that once in a while, just like the best airlines, we lose someone’s luggage, it happens to all of us. 

Since Zillow opens the door for all consumers that receive a quote to post comments – it allows tire kickers to post comments with equal weight to someone that went through the full process and closed a loan.  Could get a bit ugly. 

In fairness to Zillow, I did express these concerns and it does sound like they will be working on a more “lender manager friendly” version in the future.

But hey – it’s early..  Three Cheers to Zillow for getting this out of the gate! 

Will let you know our impressions as we go forward.