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本帖最后由 咖啡盐 于 2011-2-4 21:36 编辑
Online Shopping Made Easier
Consumers who have practically made a national sport out of hunting down the best price for everything from lipstick to laptops online often fail to comparison-shop for mortgages,finding the Web sites unhelpful or difficult to navigate(驾驭).
Some of thenation’s leading mortgage sites have responded by working to become more consumer-friendly. Their revamped sites, they say, will let borrowers not onlybrowse(浏览) lender rates and terms, but learn about market trends and read comments from other shoppers.
AtLending Tree, an online marketplace that connects borrowers to lenders, consumers can browse not just quotes from various lenders but alsoa burgeoning(急速成长的) array of industry articles, research tools, calculators and consumer-generated ratings and reviews of lenders.
In December,according to Nicole Hall, a spokes woman for LendingTree, the company created anonline feature(优点) in which borrowers can post a mortgage-related question to be answered by a Lending Tree loan specialist. “We’ve been doing a lot of development of information resources for consumers over the past year,” she said, citing the company’s growing list of how-to tips for first-time buyers and those wanting to refinance.
Even major banks are making changes. Bank of America said it was taking a “dual path” online, offering one set of articles and tools for first-time buyers, another for the more experienced. For all borrowers, “we shoot for a ninth-gradereading level for everything we put on the Web,” said Arturo Perez, a homeloans marketing executive(执行者;执行的) at the bank. “We want simpler language.”
The added educational resources and customer tools arrive amid indications that buyers aren’t shopping around for loans nearly as much as they should.
A poll ofmore than 1,300 homeowners conducted by Harris Interactive, a market research firm, for Lending Tree, and published in December, found that while 96 percent of Americans comparison-shopped for “anything,” only 61 percent said they did so for mortgages. The remaining 39 percent took out home loans based on just one quote — even though 9 in 10 of those buyers said they knew that rates varied among lenders.
Mr.Gumbinger believes that consumers, particularly first-time home buyers, simply“get freaked out” by the entire process. “There are so many choices, decisions,time pressures, things to sign,” he said. Thomas Martin, president of America’s Watchdog, a consumer advocacy group, agreed. “They are trying to educate the consumer,” he said ofthe online companies, “and there’s a lot of information out there, but a lot oftimes, it’s overkill.”
Bob Walters,the chief economist at Quicken Loans, says online mortgage companies are generally “more uniformly educational” than the bricks-and-mortar lenders. Buthe agrees about consumers’ propensity to feel overwhelmed — a fact acknowledgedon Quicken’s Web site with a hint of levity: during the holidays, it postedinstructions for turning excess paperwork into Origami.
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