E-Loan & Yahoo!

loan.yahoo.com

The main page of the Yahoo! Loan Center.
E-Loan is the exclusive provider of mortgage
information and products.

Yahoo’s new loan center uses classic “Yahoo style” with numerous links and a smattering of graphics, one of which leads you directly to its primary partner,
E-Loan (Palo Alto, CA) www.eloan.com Here’s what you’ll find in the Loan Center:

We think the Yahoo! Loan Center is a sign of things to come on the Web. Financial service providers will develop partnerships with Web-based companies to integrate financial services information and products into popular Web sites. We were surprised to see a tiny mortgage brokerage such as E-Loan become the sole provider on Yahoo. However, as Jeremy Lent, CEO of NextCard said when explaining his business model, “The Web favors the small and the quick.” No doubt, Yahoo wanted its users to have access to the broad range of mortgage products a broker can bring to the table. That, and the fact that E-Loan has one of the best lending sites on the Internet.

Rate comparisons, co-branded with Bank Rate Monitor, show national averages along with links to rates in major metro areas and all 50 states. Note: Banner ad on the top is for GetSmart .

Custom Mortgage Quotes from Yahoo/E-Loan.
All interactive features are co-branded with E-Loan.

Since we first discovered E-Loan last fall has received $5.5 million in venture capital and tremendous amount of press, almost 100% positive. For example, a single article in the Jan. 12, 1998, San Francisco Chronicle www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/01/12/BU65526.DTL sparked 240 application in a single day (at that time nearly a month’s worth of business). The story told how a 36-year-old Oracle manager purchased two $600,000 homes in a single transaction at E-Loan, saving $10,000 in closing costs and shaving $600/mo off the mortgage payments (which still totaled $6,700 after the savings).

E-Loan is currently receiving 50 to 200 applications per day (Source: Mortgage Bankers Association 5/8/98) from 285,000 monthly visitors.

*Actually it’s only been 11 months, but we think the marketing and publicity folks deserve to take June off!

E-Loan’s added a few features to the lower half of its main page since our analysis last fall (see table below).

In the eight months since E-Loan earned OBR Product of the Month honors it has added a couple small, but important improvements to the main page (screenshot above):

•  physical address is back
•  GII and CommerceNet award logos
•  rate lock button (for current clients)
•  How to Contact Us button
•  Realtor Tools (see following table)

The most innovative Realtor tool is the Instant Flyer. Realtors can create free flyers by inputting their name, company, slogan, phone number, property price, location, and three financing options to show on the flyer. It literally takes less than a minute, and you can print out as many flyers as you like right from your desktop. Naturally, the E-Loan logo and Web address appear at the bottom of each flyer.

Contact: Co-founders are Christian Larsen, President and Janina Pawloski, CEO, (650) 617-0403, janina@eloan.com .