The Mortgage Professor’s^TM 5 levels of protection to mortgage shoppers are specifically designed to level the playing field between you and mortgage lenders.

Too often the details of the mortgage are overlooked. By the time a buyer is looking for a lender, everyone is ready to complete the purchase, and with mortgage rates changing every day, shopping is such a daunting process that homebuyers often blindly accept the terms offered by the first loan officer they meet. Even when mortgage buyers do shop, other shopping services offer so many options, it’s hard to know how to choose. We’re here to help. The Mortgage Professor^TM has vetted multiple lenders and offers five levels of protection specifically designed to level the playing field between you and mortgage lenders.

1. Help Selecting the Type of Mortgage That Best Meets Your Needs

You want to select the loan program that will cost you the least over the period you expect to have the loan. But how do you know what this is? Let us help you and remove the risk that an inexperienced or careless loan officer will place you in the wrong loan.

If you are refinancing, it’s helpful to compare new loan options against your existing mortgage, but a loan officer has no incentive to do this (as they want you to purchase a new loan). We’ll provide decision support to ensure the new mortgage will cost you less in total (or over a specified time period) than the old one.

2. Shop Prices Posted Directly by Mortgage Professor^TM Certified Lenders

Loan officers have discretion in which price quotes they show you, meaning you can’t know if you are being offered the best rate. Mortgage Professor^TM gives you direct access to the prices posted by lenders. Posted prices are those at which the lender is prepared to lend.

Mortgage Professor^TM certified lenders do not engage in any abusive practices such as lowballing, mispricing, incomplete pricing, lapsed pricing, premium pricing, or lock abuse. This avoids common pitfalls of the ordinary shopping experience, for example, it’s common for the process to go like this: When first contacted, a loan officer may state a low-ball the price in order to convince you that his prices are the best and you should select him and reject the others. But then, when it comes time to lock the price, which is the point at which the price quote becomes a commitment by the lender, the rate changes: low-balling morphs into” high-balling,” where your loan is priced above the posted price. But at that point, you are heavily invested with the existing loan officer and backing out would be costly.

The Mortgage Professor^TM is not a loan officer and is not invested in you choosing any particular mortgage rate or lender. We get a referral fee regardless of which lender you chose, and therefore we don’t engage in any of these misleading tactics. In addition to ensuring that the posted prices reflect the actual rates lenders are willing to lend to you at, we only work with lenders who do not engage in any abusive practices and who satisfy a rigorous set of consumer-friendly criteria. 

Here are the Mortgage Professor^TM criteria for lenders: 

1. Lender must not engage in low-balling: no lender on our site engages in the practice of luring borrowers with impossibly-low price quotes and then raising the price after they are hooked.

2. Lender must not engage in mispricing: no lender on our site engages in the practice of basing a price quote on assumed low-risk transaction features rather than the actual features of the transaction. All lenders provide price quotes based on the figures you provide. 

3. Lender must not engage in incomplete pricing: no lender on our site may quote the price as rate and points alone, ignoring fixed-dollar lender fees. All lenders and quotes include all relevant costs. 

4. Lender must not engage in lapsed pricing: Unlike other lending sites, which retain undated lapsed prices when they are more favorable than live prices, all prices quoted on our site are live and up-to-date. 

5. No Price Premium: The largest and best-known mortgage lenders levy an extra charge for the privilege of dealing with them. Mortgage Professor^TM does not work with these lenders. 

6. Lenders must not engage in lock abuse: No lender on our site may raise the price on the lock day on the pretext that it is a market adjustment.

3. Mortgage Professor^TM Prices are Fully-Adjusted to Your Deal

You want the prices you shop to be adjusted for all the features of your transaction that affect the price. Many mortgage shopping services do know this, but limit the number of factors you can input. For example, if there are 10 factors that affect your price and the site asks about only 6, it means that the site is assuming values for the other 4 that are most favorable to you.  This results in mispricing that likely understates the actual cost of the loan. We do not engage in this practice. The Mortgage Professor^TM mortgage shopper allows you to input all relevant factors to find the best all-in priced loan.

4. Mortgage Professor^TM Prices Are Always Current

You want the prices you shop to be up to date, not obsolete. Since lenders reset their prices every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, a system providing timely prices must be directly linked to the system that generates prices.  Sites that require participating lenders to update prices on the site as a separate operation invariably fall behind, especially during periods of rapid market change. The Mortgage Professor’s^TM system is directly linked to lender’s pricing generators, guaranteeing that any price changes a lender makes automatically and simultaneously occurs on our site.