by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Mike Mueller is leaving the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. A poor consumer performance review drove him to do just that.
From the consumer review on Zillow Mortgage:
Rating: 1 / 5
Comment: I asked for conforming quote, got sent jumbo quote with huge fees. I even specifically noted the request in the ‘notes’ section due to the newly raised conforming loan limits. If a lender cannot start off paying attention to the customer’s needs there’s no reason to go further.
Reviewer: srg418
Is Mike a crybaby? Hardly. Mike Mueller’s one of the real pros out here and that’s what has me worried about Zillow’s mortgage offering. In their effort to be consumer-centric, they are forgetting that the the “truth” lies in a lender’s opinion of the borrower. If the truth (in this case) is the loan terms, then why are we letting consumers wreck lender’s reputations for delivering it?
Mike delivered the unpalatable news that the “new” jumbo conforming rates were different from the conforming rates. I did that about two months ago to a customer and was equally admonished for my “deceitful tricks”…until the customer started applying for loans. Fortunately, the customer was fair-minded enough to tell me that he funded his conforming-jumbo loan with another lender…at a higher rate than I quoted him. Nobody won- he paid more and I lost money because of his inability to deal with the reality of mortgage guidelines.
The problem lies with the one-way mirror used on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. Like a perp in an interview room, mortgage professionals are criticized by consumers with predetermined bias. It is the bias of “needing to be correct” that stems from an inadequacy to deal with the truth. That sort of bias convicted Ruben Carter and I’m afraid that it hung Mike Mueller as well. Now, Mike won his case on appeal and fortunately it didn’t take 22 years for the truth to come out. From David G, in the comments thread:
I’ve deleted the review. Borrowers on Zillow can only rate lenders that they’ve worked with but I must Read more