U.S. mortgage applications fell by 1.2% during the first week of February, despite the fact that interest rates for 30-year term home loans dropped below 5% for the first time since December 11.
Lower mortgage rates did increase demand for home refinancing loans. Principal beneficiaries of this trend are online vendors that offer mortgage loan products online.
This article ranks the most popular home mortgage websites for U.S. residents. Listed below are the top 10 sites that generate the:
- Most web visitors per month
- Highest percentage of search engine traffic.
Most Popular Websites for Home Loans by Number of Visitors
Listed below are the 10 most popular websites for home loans that attract the most online traffic.
- Lending Tree … 1 million monthly visitors (down 1% over past 3 months)
- MortgageLoan.com … 421,689 monthly visitors (up 21%)
- CitiMortgage … 163,639 monthly visitors (up 32%)
- Quicken Loans … 141,298 monthly visitors (up 21%)
- E-Loan … 129,516 monthly visitors (up 12%)
- Ditech … 119,553 monthly visitors (up 48%)
- Personal Home Loan Mortgages … 33,229 monthly visitors (up 16.4%)
- Mortgage Lenders Plus … 15,343 monthly visitors (up 30%)
- Home and Family Bills … 13,599 monthly visitors (no change)
- National Mortgage … 11,266 monthly visitors (up 60%).
Lending Tree Home Loans
The website for Lending Tree Home Loans captures the highest number of online visitors. This is partly because the site has online tools that cater to both the first-time home buyer and sophisticated real estate financiers. Sets of tools include mortgage loan payment and refinancing calculators.
The second-most popular site, MortgageLoan.com, has an online quote calculator that computes home refinance offers by state and user credit profile. The MortgageLoan website also has a search widget that enables users to find home loan brokers and lenders in the city and state in which they live.
CitiMortgage offers residential mortgage loans to consumers residing throughout the U.S. Their website has a homeowner assistance section that offers refinancing advice such as negotiating lower interest rates as part of The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.
Quicken Loans has increased its online traffic by over 20% per month. Quicken Loans’ website is written in plain English and has made the online application process for home loan mortgages simple and intuitive. One of Quicken Loans’ sales pitches is that consumers can close a home loan in half the time of most other lenders.
E-Loan provides car loans, credit cards and business financing in addition to home loan mortgages. A considerable amount of traffic comes to the E-Loan site looking for online help with bad credit home loans.
Top Websites for Mortgage Loans with Most Search Engine Traffic
Only 3 of the 10 top websites for loans attract more than 40% of their page views from search engine results page (SERP) links. Companies like Lending Tree and Ditech seem to invest more marketing dollars into television ads. CitiMortgage may depend more on cross-selling to customers that parent company CitiBank sends its way.
- Personal Home Loan Mortgages … 45.3% of total monthly visitors (15,053 search visitors)
- MortgageLoan.com … 44.3% (186,808)
- Mortgage Lenders Plus … 40.4% (6,198)
- E-Loan … 30.6% (39,632)
- Lending Tree … 25.3% (256,124)
- Quicken Loans … 24.2% (34,194)
- Ditech … 28.2% (19,965)
- National Mortgage … 11.1% (1,250)
- CitiMortgage … 8.8% (14,400)
- Home and Family Bills … 4.7% (639).
Yet a smaller company like Personal Home Loan Mortgages has been more aggressive and successful in capturing a higher percentage of online search traffic. Personal Home Loan’s website has a detailed section with the latest mortgage rates as well as an online directory of local mortgage brokers and lenders.
Mortgage Lenders Plus is an even smaller company, but is able to attract a superior percentage of visitors searching online for second mortgage or bad credit mortgage lenders.
Ditech Home Mortgage Loans
Ditech’s website enables borrowers to obtain mortgages directly from a lender rather than relying on an intermediary such as a broker. Despite offering faster and easier access to mortgage loans online, Ditech garners less than a third of its web traffic from searches. Given that the target audience is a group of consumers who want immediate access to mortgage loans via a website, one might expect that Ditech would have streamlined the search engine ranking of its website.
National Mortgage is an online media shop that services people looking for information on mortgage financing and other details related to moving to a new home. The National Mortgage website has many online gadgets including an interactive map that helps visitors find a real estate agent. Another tool quickly searches for home inspectors by zip code, while a separate widget compares quotes for relocating to another city or state.
Home and Family Bills’ website receives the tiniest percentage of search engine traffic. This is not surprising, considering the unprofessional design of the website. For example, the home page blinks on and off every 5 seconds.
Who would commitment to personal home loan mortgages from a website that looks that unstable and on the verge of bankruptcy itself?
Sources: This article provides independent calculations and insights based on data from the leading Internet traffic monitoring site Alexa.
Daniel Workman - A senior business and finance writer who also does French translations, notably international trade and insurance materials.
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