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Online Mortgage Sourcing History
For the last ten years or so the world of mortgages has changed dramatically. Prior to that anyone wishing to buy a house or remortgage would go to a bank on the High Street and a bank employee would help them find a suitable mortgage from a range of four or five products. Although this world does still exist to some extent, and is the choice of some, things have changed.
Mortgage brokers became popular during the nineties and continue to provide more mortgages than any other means. Mortgage brokers of course help clients to choose products from a range of lenders so that the public can get a better deal. The widespread use of the PC and the laptop was a big help and desktop sourcing became a Godsend to brokers, enabling them to very rapidly compare hundreds or even thousands of mortgages quickly and logically.
The advent of online comparison systems and databases at the start of the millennium then brought another radical change. It became possible for the public to find a mortgage for themselves. The mortgage comparison website has been a great success with a number of advantages for the general public. The first and main advantage is that people no longer had to rely on advice. Advice which may or may not have been good advice, may have been expensive and may not have even been honest. For the savvier or more financially literate visitors to a website, the development of these tools allowed close inspection of all available options.
Mortgage tools on websites fall into three distinct categories; firstly, there are basic calculators, then there are tables of data that can be used to compare mortgages then there are online mortgage sourcing tools that the public can actually use to enter specific information to generate a list of mortgages that are suitable for that person to apply for.
Calculators such as interest calculators allow simple calculations about payments and interest for mortgage amounts at a given interest rate. This also applies to secured loans, or second charge calculators for loans that aren't mortgages but are secured using properties. Other forms of calculator include Budget Planners. Budget Planners as the name suggests allow you to enter you income after tax and all your outgoings to show a surplus or deficit which will determine whether you can afford to borrow.
Mortgage Tables provide lists of mortgages, usually separated by category such as Remortgage, Buy to Let or Self employed for example. The best examples of these show all mortgages in each category with the ability to page down or sort by clicking on column headings to find the best initial rate, best overall cost, loan to value, or however you wish to sort the information.
The final category of mortgage tools, the sourcing tools, is the most important. These generally operate as questionnaires, either on a single screen of various length or on a multiple page wizard style structure. By entering data such as the property value, required loan amount, current salary and a number of others, the system will generate a list of products that are suitable.
eLink Technologies has developed mortgage data systems for websites for nearly a decade and provides data to about 95% of UK mortgage sites with such data via its industry leading mortgageLinked system. For more information about mortgageLinked please email info@mortgagelinked.co.uk.
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