Zillow To Offer In-House Mortgages For Homebuyers

Online real estate company Zillow has announced it will offer home loans through a new division that lets mortgage seekers get funding right from the company.

CNBC reported this is Zillow’s latest move toward having customers buy and sell homes on the site. In February, Zillow said it was going to focus on the real estate buying and selling business, projecting an annual revenue of $20 billion over five years.

Mortgage origination is part of the company’s efforts to expand further in the real estate market to create better experiences for consumers who are searching for and buying homes. In 2018, Zillow acquired Mortgage Lenders of America, and renamed the new venture “Home Loans.”

It will work with Zillow Offers, which is the company’s direct home sales operation that was created to streamline the real estate process. However, customers who want to get home loans don’t need to use Zillow Offers, the company said.

“With Zillow Home Loans, we are taking an incredible step forward to deliver an integrated payments platform to complete the financing for Zillow Offers that delivers a more seamless, on-demand real estate experience today’s consumers expect,” Erin Lantz, Zillow’s vice president and general manager of mortgages, said in a statement.

The company is also changing up its logos and website design in conjunction with the announcement.

According to a report in GeekWire citing an interview with Zillow Co-Founder and CEO Rich Barton, Zillow plans to create an Amazon-like experience for mortgages; mortgage origination will be tied into the app similar to how payments are integrated into Uber.

“This is why we founded Zillow, to actually change the way people bought and sold houses, and the way they found a new place,” Barton told GeekWire. “This was our original conception, something like this to actually solve the real estate headaches that we were experiencing, that our moms and sisters and brothers were experiencing.”