- Good idea. A few years back I built https://originationdata.com that compares mortgage lenders (both FDIC & FCUA members) using HMDA data. I modeled rates by lender, product type as well as by facets like MSA (as well as STL FRED data, too). It grew for a few years and I was ecstatic-- getting backlinks organically from some impressive sites (e.g. larger banks themselves, consumer publications) as well as positive user feedback. Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and Google search traffic absolutely tanked, so I kind of abandoned it and moved onto other projects that won't be SEO oriented, since Google's view of quality is unbeknownst to me.
- Nice work.
Navy Federal has always had competitive rates:
https://www.navyfederal.org/loans-cards/mortgage/mortgage-ra...
Membership requires a military connection in the family, but it can go back to grandparents:
https://www.navyfederal.org/membership/eligibility.html
by CommenterPerson
4 subcomments
- Nice Work!
I found our credit union posts the mortgage rates clearly on a plain text like page. There's no BS and no games. Whereas with the big banks, you get the games and higher rates .. no matter if they have records of 10 years of your salary deposits. When I tried to suggest credit unions to friends, I got looks. Like, people just assume what everyone else does (get conned by big banks) is good.
by throwaway2037
7 subcomments
> Estimated monthly payment based on purchasing $400,000 home with 20% down, $567/mo taxes and insurance, and 1.65% closing costs.
Does anyone know the source of these numbers? Example: The are national median values.Except maybe Texas, where else can you buy a house/apt in the US near a major job center for only 400k?
- Having worked in mortgage, two important points:
1. Credit unions and large banks do not have access to the same vault of loan products at the same rates as each other. Fannie and Freddie offer rate discounts at volume.
2. Credit unions typically do not run mortgage programs for profit, unlike big banks. This also contributes to their ability to eat your cost.
Tit-for-tat, if you reduce it all down, the Chase's and Wells' should be able to offer the better terms based on their agreements with GSEs/secondary markets.
In reality, no one is getting the product at face value, so opportunities like this will exist, and you can take advantage of it like in these cases.
- At first glance, this site seems fantastic! Great job! (As a side note, I've been reading Hacker news for years but have never been active; I created an account just to make this comment)
by satellite2
1 subcomments
- Are those really standardized in the US?
Where I live the condition vary widely. And basically the switching costs might easily dominate the total costs if you move/sell.
I've found that taking this into account it was better to trade a few places in term of interests for better conditions.
- Everyone should switch to a local credit union.
The rates are better, they're entirely local, and they're usually not trying to actively screw you.
by msuniverse2026
6 subcomments
- God I wish we had 30 year fixed mortgages here in Australia. Imagine getting one of those during covid when rates were below 3%. Incredible.
- Good work!
Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).
In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.
Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.
- Cool concept, but it doesn’t account for assumptions the sites make when displaying rates. Not something to you can really account for across the board though is it? Like “assuming a $300k loan on a home valued at $600k” to get a low 5’s rate… for example.
by JensRantil
2 subcomments
- I find it somewhat interesting that a US 30 year fixed mortgage is 5,49%, while a 10 year fixed mortgage in Sweden currently is at 3,6%[1]. Big difference!
[1] https://www.compricer.se/borantor/
by eagrt4tdg
1 subcomments
- Very nice! I would be great if there was also a way to see rates for investment properties.
by latortuga
1 subcomments
- It's always fun to open the front page of HN and see a familiar face. I went to college with this guy! Congrats on shipping Mahmoud!
- This is awesome! I wish there was sth similar for Europe! In Germany you have to go to a morgage broker and trust that his self-interest is aligned with yours :D
- Curious, where did you source the data from? Did you just scrape the invidividual bank web sites?
by lefstathiou
1 subcomments
- The Credit Union Mortgage Association can make the crawling easier via this link: https://mortgages.cumortgage.net/start_up.asp
- My credit union gives me better rates if I'm "active", which means some number of transactions per month. Thus you really need to pick a credit union and start using them a few months before if you want the best rates. (maybe, depending on how that credit union works)
- This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...
by NortySpock
1 subcomments
- CU suggestion: Kansas City's largest, CommunityAmerica Credit Union
https://www.communityamerica.com/about-us
- Great initiative and beautiful site! Tiny nitpick, the wrapping of the controls above the table on my phone could probably be improved. What did you use for the table?
by ta12653421
1 subcomments
- good one, mission accomplished!
++1
Ideas for monetization:
Setup an automatic email alert if prices are changing for a given area and charge 5 USD per year per user.
Also you could extend this project and sell it later to one of the financial mags / publishers / websites.
by joshuamcginnis
1 subcomments
- Very cool. Can you tell us the tech and tools you used to reliably scrape? or get all of the rate data from the various websites?
by redindian75
1 subcomments
- Do you do daily scraping to get fresh data? or use services like firecrawler or something?
- I didn't do a CU for my mortgage (mostly because my lender is awesome and I'm happy with our rate), but I did for my recent auto loan and moved my accounts to them.
NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENCE. customer service is fantastic and their online banking app/website is no bullshit. It even supports TOTP 2FA, which I definitely wasn't expecting given that the huge bank I came from didn't for some reason.
Can't recommend a credit union enough.
by ambicapter
1 subcomments
- "Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.
- > No signup, no ads, no referral fees.
Nice
- Love it!
Where do you get the data?
by thedudeabides5
0 subcomment
- nice, more people should do stuff like this
- Great work. I used to use Bankrate for this, but its UX has gone to shit over the past few years, so it's nice to have an alternative!
- Nice job!
- Awesome
- ccc
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