As of this morning, RMC Vanguard Loan Officers have quoted 855 of the over 10,000 consumer loan requests on Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace. Of those quoted we have had contact with 3.27%.
So, here is the good, bad and ugly and other suggestions:.
Good:
Lots of consumers are interested in receiving mortgage information
Bad:
They don’t seem to be quite as interested in doing anything beyond receiving quotes,
Consumers seem to be confused about how to select the best quote,
Amount of opportunities to quote seem to drop each day.
Ugly:
Low contact rate, loan officers loosing interest.
Other suggestions:
1) Automate the process of quoting. We would recommend using Mortech-Inc. They support over 70 lenders, we are one of them and have had a long standing relationship.
2) Cap the number of quotes a consumer can receive. This creates an incentive for the lenders to respond quickly and makes it easier for the consumer to understand and compare the offers.
3) Allow consumers to input their contact information,
4) Create a formal process for Zillow to police low ballers, i.e. set up an email address consumers or lenders could use to notify zillow of abuse. For example, lowballquotes@zillow.com
5) Create a management console so that we can keep tabs on what our LO’s are doing, vs. not doing.
3 responses so far ↓
1 davidg // Apr 17, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Hi, i’s David G from Zillow,
Great feedback; thank you Owen.
It’s been fascinating to watch the balancing out of supply and demand in the marketplace. We were most certainly short of lenders at launch. You’re right that quote requests were steadily decreasing since then but yesterday we started to see an increase; it was 2nd biggest day (for requests) since launch.
We’re focused on two things;
a) tweaking and increasing the ways we promote the Mortgage Marketplace to borrowers on the site and,
b) adding features to the Marketplace in response to early feedback from lenders and borrowers.
And so, on to your suggestions:
1) We are working on automating quotes. Rather than limit ourselves to a single technology provider we’re building an open API that any lender or software vendor could integrate to. This is not a small project; expect us to take a few months to ship the quote API.
2) I don’t know that we need more incentive for rapid quotes; attractive loan requests are receiving multiple quotes in minutes. I do agree that receiving 100 quotes would be confusing but the transparency lenders have into competing quotes seems to be doing a job of ensuring that that doesn’t happen (even though we now have > 1200 lenders.) Thinking through your first question however we may well need a cap when quotes are optimized. What number would you choose and why?
3) There’s nothing stopping a consumer from entering their contact info in their loan requests’ comments and as trust in the marketplaces increases I’m sure you’ll see some of them do that.
4) Yes! We are receiving both useful and false-positive reports about low-ballers. It’s keeping us busy. We’re working on a quote flagging system due out soon but in the meantime, please e-mail me Owen.
5) Yep, I hear you. Please keep asking for this one. I’d also like to hear from other companies that are interested in a corporate level account for administering and reporting on their team on Zillow.
2 Bill Rice // Apr 18, 2008 at 4:59 am
David (and Spencer too),
It is great to see you out in the market taking and responding to feedback.
Owen,
Did you seriously just ask for Lead Management? We need to talk. We can solve this issue for you and Zillow in less than a week.
Bill
3 oraun // Apr 18, 2008 at 7:22 am
Great - thanks for the comments -
once zillow allows for the api posting of consumer requests then we can get that into our lead mgmt system - at this point it requires someone to type consumer requests into it - which we are not doing
Bill - always looking for the opportunity!
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