The vast majority of home buyers are extremely interested in current mortgage rates. Sure, there are some individuals who have enough cash to purchase a house outright, but that represents a tiny minority of the buyers out there and is definitely not the norm. Most buyers are average, middle-class families looking to buy their first home, relocate from their current residence to something larger, or maybe even downsize to something in the city. And, they need a mortgage.
On Zillow, we’ve seen consumer interest in mortgage information increase over the past 6 months. Between July and January, we’ve seen a 56% jump in clicks (as a % of total page views on home details pages) from home details pages to Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. Of course we’ve made some product changes to help drive awareness to our mortgage product, but there is more at play here that accounts for the increased consumer interest. One reason is that it’s a buyer’s market and local rates dictate what kind of mortgage a buyer can afford. Another is the flurry of posted rate activity all over the mainstream media, making mortgage rates top of mind for consumers. For real estate professionals reading this, are you capitalizing by giving your visitors access to real-time rate information on your site?
As with our Zestimates and Zillow Home Value Index data, our syndication model is to allow anyone to use our data for free, provided there is Zillow branding and links back to the source of the data. With respect to mortgage rate information, there are two primary types of integrations possible with our mortgage APIs:
- A real-time mortgage rate table
- A calculator or monthly payment estimate module using today’s live rates (which we added to Zillow home detail pages back in August)
I already blogged about some examples of mortgage rates implemented on other sites, but I wanted to highlight the concept of integrating a “Monthly Payment Estimate” module onto listing detail pages so that buyers can determine whether a listing is in their price range at today’s rates (example below).
Luckily, one of our talented developers, Cole Rottweiler, put together some sample code detailing exactly how to create a monthly payment estimate module with our GetMonthlyPayments API. Of course, you can tweak the front-end design of the module to add to your page or do your own custom integration, but Cole’s code may save you some time if you’re interested in giving your audience access to a monthly payment estimate module from listing detail pages on your site.
If you know that your buyers are out there checking mortgage rates daily or weekly, why not enable them to do that directly from your site rather than another site? With Zillow’s mortgage APIs, rate widgets, calculator widget, and our monthly payment module — there are multiple ways to give your buyers access to the same realtime rates they could access in Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.