With the changing of the leaves comes the changing of Zillow. Zillow, you know the one — that real estate website that has helped home buyers find houses for years — has decided to enter the mortgage game.
Yep, you read that right. Late Wednesday, the company completed its acquisition of Mortgage Lenders of America (MLoA). MLoA is a privately held online lender in Kansas… well, they were. They’ll still operate from their Kansas HQ and they’ll keep their VP, but Z is the captain now.
That’s one small step for home buyers and one giant leap for the real estate industry. All other aspects of consumerism has made its way to the ether, there’s no reason mortgage lending shouldn’t either.
Zillow has been in the search and listing side of real estate for over a decade now. However, they first dipped their toes into the selling side of the real estate biz when they announced their “Instant Offers” program, which allows sellers in particular markets to receive offers from investors. Shortly thereafter, in a fairly predictable move, they became an investor and purchased homes as well.
Becoming a lender was a very obvious next step for the online real estate site and has been a long time coming.
Now, with the acquisition of MLoA, they’ll have the capacity to be more than just an investor. To accompany the acquisition, there’s supposedly a rebrand for MLoA in the near future, too.
This acquisition certainly opens avenues to develop tools and partnerships.
“Getting a mortgage can be the toughest, most painstaking and time-consuming part of the home-buying process,” Greg Schwartz, president of media and marketplaces at Zillow, said in a statement. “Having our own mortgage origination service as an option for consumers will allow us to streamline the process for people who buy a Zillow-owned home.”
This is a huge move for Zillow. They went from showing home buyers homes to actually buying homes and now financing the buyers purchasing those home.
While this certainly streamlines, shortens, and simplifies the home-buying process for consumers in the Zillow Offers world, it will be interesting to see how it effects them as a company and the mortgage industry as a whole.
