I think its fair to say that this looks pretty interesting. The domain reads like a bad spam domain, though. Did someone skip the chapter on branding?
I did walk through their mortgage evaluator. The process was pretty straightforward, and they didnt ask for any upfront personal information like most of the scam mortgage sites out there.
I'm not sure I'm ready to pay $10 for mortgage assistance, but this might be an interesting thing to do if I was actually buying a home. I'm definitely going to keep it in the bookmarks, but I'm curious how they plan to keep people paying the $10/mo over the long haul. Traditionally, real estate services, and also paid review sites like Angielist have very high churn rate. People sign up, get the info they want, and then unsubscribe. Rinse repeat every 12-18 months when they need something.
UPDATE: I went through the process to signup since they are offering 90 days free, and was presented with multiple Apache/Tomcat errors halfway through the process. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence -- I stopped right away. Giving my social security number to a website that is having server failure? Bad idea.
This is an important lesson: even if it is beta, you are opening your doors to people. If you mess it up, they are less likely to trust you, permanently.
I have some recommendations for making it look more questionable:
1. Switch to .info domain name
2. Homepage should have more color and more gratuitous animation - maybe seek out Matthew Lesko's people?
3. There's a contact link at the bottom of the page - remove that so no one has any idea who the hell is behind it.
Maybe the domain name is a SEO play. It only sounds like a Spam domain to internet savvy users. To the other millions of people who only know Hotmail, AOL and Google it won't seem so. And they will click on the link when it rises to the top of search result.
Mortgage brokers can make money from both the up-front fees they collect from customers as well as fees which they sometimes receive from the wholesale mortgage lenders who actually provide the money for the loans. The up-front fees are revealed to the customer and the other fees are not. They can be in the thousands of dollars.
I did some database work for several retail mortgage providers several years ago; it's possible this has changed now but I rather doubt it. At that time, as I learned how the system worked, I was a bit shocked and thought the whole mortgage business seemed very dodgy though everyone assured me that's just how the industry worked.
I wonder if Cringely's service is making this "money on the backside" (that's what they call it) or if the $10/month subscription is really all they get?
They deny this "backside" money pretty emphatically on their home page. However, the mortgage industry's reputation is so shredded at this point that I scarcely believe them for no other reason than they're in the mortgage business.
If it is true that they help you monitor your identity and credit score and on top of that help you strategize ways to better position yourself not only credit wise but also mortgage wise, I could see the benefit in remaining subscribed.
As a home owner and someone who has been through more than one refinance process it is nice to work with an organization that is not beholden to the other side of the equation - the lenders. This model is incentivized to more favorably aligned with my interests.
The problem to be solved was "it was in the interest of the lender to keep mortgage holders owing as much as possible for as long as possible".
The broker solved that by having his customers pay him a one time fee, which aligns their interests: now they both want the loan to be paid off as soon as possible. It saves the customer money and the broker time.
And then Cringely changes the one time fee to a monthly payment, which seems to me like going back to square one. Home-Account is motivated to improve your situation just enough to keep you a happy customer, but also to keep you as a customer for as long as possible.
The product home-account says they are providing is not a "let's improve their situation enough to make them a happy customer" but something that claims to be a mathematically optimal way of refinancing your home mortage. Then they will tell you when it becomes optimal to refinance your home again. Already they hint that they will begin competing with mint.com so eventually they'll provide lots of useful services.
The monthly payment is not a bad thing. It makes it much, much cheaper for the customers. It does not change it so the service will suddenly mislead their customers about the best thing to do for their finances.
I did walk through their mortgage evaluator. The process was pretty straightforward, and they didnt ask for any upfront personal information like most of the scam mortgage sites out there.
I'm not sure I'm ready to pay $10 for mortgage assistance, but this might be an interesting thing to do if I was actually buying a home. I'm definitely going to keep it in the bookmarks, but I'm curious how they plan to keep people paying the $10/mo over the long haul. Traditionally, real estate services, and also paid review sites like Angielist have very high churn rate. People sign up, get the info they want, and then unsubscribe. Rinse repeat every 12-18 months when they need something.