Finding The Right Mortgage Broker

There are hundreds of mortgage brokers in each state. How do you know which one to choose so that you get at the closing table on time and with the interest rate, loan conditions, and fees that you were promised? Here are some pointers and statistics that should provide you with the knowledge and skills you need to identify the appropriate mortgage broker, engage with them, and reduce your risks before closing. Here is the useful source.

Let’s start by eliminating some of the ways in which borrowers usually choose a mortgage broker. This may simply prevent the majority of issues from arising in the first place.

The Wrong Way to Look for a Mortgage

You could go online and contact the first several mortgage brokers that come up, look in the local Sunday Real Estate Section to see who has the lowest rate, or call someone from the Yellow Pages, as many people do. These, on the other hand, should be considered methods NOT to shop for a mortgage:

Searching the Internet

On the Internet, almost every mortgage broker is listed. While it’s a useful tool, it’s not the greatest method to find a mortgage. It may seem self-evident to some, but just because a mortgage broker’s website appears high in search engine results does not imply they provide the best rates, service, or are even trustworthy. High search engine results do not reflect these characteristics; rather, the webmaster who created the site likely spent hundreds of hours developing and fine-tuning it to appear in the Internet listings when you put in certain mortgage “keywords.” The number of other comparable Web sites that connect to that Web site, the number of visits it gets, how much the broker may have spent to be included there, and a variety of other criteria are used by search engines to rank results.

“You must be respectable since you came up #1 on Google,” a client once told me. Yes, I am respectable, and I like to believe we provide excellent service and competitive prices, but that isn’t why my broker was ranked first. (This is number one out of over 275,000 results for “atlanta mortgage.”) It was because the webmaster spent hundreds of hours creating and fine-tuning all of the site’s pages in order for them to rank well.

Many websites provide online rates from mortgage companies. I’m not a big fan of websites that publish these companies’ rates online. Mortgage brokers often pay to be featured on such sites, and some of them are “affiliate” sites. This implies they will be paid a fee if the visitor follows the link they clicked. Click on the link it sends you to and look at the web address to see whether you’re on a “affiliate” site. It’s usually an affiliate if there’s a code at the end of the domain name. There’s nothing wrong with this; just be aware that some of the sites may be skewed by businesses who pay or provide incentives to be included on them.

Another piece of advice is to avoid wasting time by clicking on promoted links. They are displayed in the right column on Google (and more recently at the top of every page in a shaded box), whereas AOL’s links are softly coloured boxes at the top and bottom of the page, and Yahoo’s links are listed in the right column and in a coloured box at the bottom of the page. They are “sponsored” links, as the name suggests, which means the broker has paid to be included.