Two ways to obtain a mortgage:

There are basically two ways for you, as a consumer, to obtain a mortgage. One is to go to a "retail" lender, like your bank. These lenders typically maintain physical retail branches to sell their own loan products directly to the consumer. When you visit them, the only loan products and rates you will be shown are those offered by that one institution.

The other way to obtain a mortgage is by visiting a mortgage broker. Mortgage brokers have the significant advantage of access to many lenders, often 50 or more. As a result, they have a much greater selection of loan programs and rates, and greater ability to find the best loan for your circumstances. This is why more than half of the mortgages in the country are originated by mortgage brokers.

How do brokers keep up with daily rate changes from 50 or more lenders?

Traditionally, every morning, each lender creates a "ratesheet" with their loan programs and rates for that day. This is usually 1-3 legal size pages, in small print, done in a spreadsheet program like Excel or Lotus. These ratesheets are then faxed to thousands of brokers all over the country every morning.

Some brokers receive over 50 of these every day. Each lender has a different format. In addition, usually there are notes telling the broker to add a quarter point for this circumstance, or deduct an eighth of a point for that condition, so the broker has to do manual calculations to get the correct rate before he can compare them. You can click here to see what one of these ratesheets looks like. (Please note, this is a rather large image that will take a bit of time to download.)

As you can imagine, wading through the pile of faxed rate sheets to find the best loan for a consumer is incredibly inefficient. So much so, in fact, that typically the broker will limit himself to 3-5 lenders because he cannot realistically keep up with rates on much more than that many. LION's Loan Search changes all that.