Bronte Media

Although by night I make uninvited but exceedingly sharp predictions about the online ad industry and generally pat myself on the back, by day I run a company called Homethinking.com. Well, today we launched a Mortgage section that allows home owners to see actual transactional data on mortgage lenders.

Why would the public want to browse through 33 million mortgage records? Well if you are refinancing your mortgage you can see who the leading lender by market share is. If you are considering buying a house in Miami, Florida for instance, you could see that it had one of the highest subprime loan rates in the country in 2006:

Why is 2006 important? Many of the subprime loans have low introductory rates that reset usually on a 2 year timeline (i.e. this year). Many home owners had hoped their homes would have appreciated in value so that rather than paying the high interest rate they reset to, they could simply refinance and get a more traditional mortgage because they had built home equity. Zillow came out with some great data on how that’s turning out.

Even though prices in places like Miami and Vegas have been plummeting you can see from the mortgage data in places like Miami, there will still likely be a lot of pain. Florida has a lot of investment properties (that is the homes are bought with the intention to rent out or as a holiday home as well) which adds another dimension you can see through the data.

So you can put together crumbs and see that real estate markets aren’t going up in areas like Miami anytime soon. p.s. another fantastic resource for real-time market pricing is Altos Research where you can chart the decline and mayhem week to week.

Launching a mortgage site in May of 2008 may seem like a stupendously dumb idea. But the short term has very little to do with it. Yes mortgage lead prices have plummeted (and so to the eCPM of direct response inclined mortgage sites). And half the industry that partied drunk on high fees on exotic mortgages are now dead. But I am building for the longer term where the site can become valuable to users and that will take years. Here are a few short ideas of what is next on the company blog.

Also, as a blogger you can embed any of the charts on the site into blog posts much like you can with site traffic data at places like compete.com. Hopefully the data will act as a kind of conversation starter to draw out informed analysis of the market.

Finally, I am also fired up about another project we are working on that will help people choose where to live that we will be launching in a few months (fingers crossed).

Enjoy!