I'm afraid not. Most mortgage lenders change their prices daily, generally in
the morning after secondary markets open, and sometimes they will change them
during the day as well. This is a major problem for shoppers using traditional
distribution channels, since prices collected from lender 1 on Monday and from
lender 2 on Tuesday will not be comparable if the market has changed in the meantime.
Prices advertised in newspapers are out of date when they are read. A newspaper
that publishes price information in its Monday edition, for example, is reporting
Friday's prices. On Monday when the paper hits the street, lenders have already
posted new prices.
The internet can ease the pain of shoppers trying to stay abreast of the market.
For one thing, it provides more current information than the printed media.
On Monday morning when the newspapers are reporting Friday's prices, some web
sites are reporting Monday's prices. In addition, it is easy to compare prices
of different lenders on the internet, so having to repeat the process on successive
days is not a burden.
But not all mortgage web sites provide current data. The great majority of
single-lender sites are not kept current. Multi-lender referral sites, which
provide price information on hundreds or even thousands of lenders, are dependent
on the lenders to keep their information up to date, which some do but many
don't. Some of the prices posted on the internet, therefore, are even more out
of date than those in the newspapers. Almost always, however, the date of the
quote is given so you can ignore those that are not current. If the date is
not given, you can assume the quote is not current.
October 19, 2002
