The things worth knowing before you upload anything

Is any of this legal advice?

No, and the line is worth stating exactly. We describe what your documents say, what the figures in them come to, and what other arrangements exist in the market. We do not draft contract language, we do not produce an addendum, and we do not tell you what to require of anybody — those are things a lawyer does and we are not one.

The distinction is easy to blur one helpful sentence at a time, so it is enforced rather than remembered: every string these pages can say about an agreement lives in a small number of files, and those files are scanned for instructing language before anything ships. If you want somebody to tell you what to demand, that is a real service and it is a lawyer.

Will my agent or my lender be annoyed that I asked?

Almost certainly not, and it is worth knowing why rather than being reassured. Loan officers renegotiate fees constantly — it is a routine part of a competitive market, and a borrower with a written quote from somebody else is the most ordinary conversation in their week. Agents amend agreements for the same reason. Neither is surprised.

It also helps that you are not asking anybody to do you a favour. You are asking about numbers that were set by a person and can be set differently by the same person. A question about a figure in a document is not a complaint about the person who handed it to you, and it is very unlikely to be received as one.

Why should I pay when other comparison sites are free?

Because of how the free ones are funded. A site that compares lenders and charges you nothing is paid by lenders — per lead, per click, or per closed loan — which means the thing being sold is you, and the ordering you are shown is the product. That is not a criticism of the people who work there; it is the arithmetic of who signs the cheque.

We are paid a flat published fee by the person we are helping, before the work is delivered, and by nobody else. There is no lender payment table in our database, no field that could hold one, and an automated check fails our build if someone adds one. That is the whole difference, and it is the kind you can verify rather than take on trust.

You also see the finding before you pay for anything, and if there is nothing worth asking for we say so and offer you nothing to buy.

What if I am buying in Lynchburg?

Then the loan tools work exactly as they do anywhere — reading a Loan Estimate has nothing to do with who your agent is — but you will not be offered agent proposals, and that is deliberate.

Mason, who built this, is a licensed real estate agent working in Lynchburg City and the four surrounding counties. Running a marketplace that helps buyers choose an agent, in the market where the owner competes for that business, is the conflict this site spends a page ruling out. So those counties are excluded in code rather than by policy, and they are named on our promise page so you can check the list rather than take our word for it.

Why do agents pay you?

For the same reason you do: to put something in front of somebody who asked for it. An agent pays a flat published fee to submit a proposal to a buyer who requested proposals — charged at submission, the same amount for everyone in that price band, and never a percentage of their commission or anything taken at closing.

It buys them the chance to be read and nothing else. It does not buy position, ordering, or a better chance of being drawn — which three agents get to submit is decided by a weighted random draw, and the only things that move an agent’s odds are six behaviours published in full before they pay us anything. Whether the buyer picks them is between the buyer and them.

Will shopping several lenders hurt my credit?

Not the way people fear. The credit scoring models treat multiple mortgage inquiries made while you are shopping as a single inquiry, precisely so that comparing lenders is not punished. That is a deliberate feature of how mortgage credit is scored, not a loophole.

The window is not the same across every scoring model and version, so do not take a specific number of days from us or from anyone else as gospel — the practical advice is to do your shopping in a concentrated stretch rather than spread over months. If you want the exact treatment for the model your lender pulls, ask them which one they use.

Will this delay my closing?

It should not, because this belongs earlier than closing. The work happens at pre-approval — before you lock a rate and before you are under contract on a house. That is when quotes are actually comparable and when a lender still has room to move.

We are not asking you to switch lenders mid-deal. If you are already under contract and locked, this is probably not the right moment for it, and we would rather say so than sell you something at the wrong time.

What happens to my documents?

They are encrypted before they are written to disk and only decrypted to read them. If a Social Security number appears on a document, it is stripped out of everything we extract from it — the figures we keep and the text the model sees — so it never reaches our database. The document itself is kept as you sent it, encrypted, and erased when you delete it.

We do not sell them, rent them, or share them, and we never send them to a lender — we never contact lenders at all. You can delete everything at any time, and delete means erased rather than hidden.

One thing survives deletion: an anonymized benchmark row carrying a state, a week, a loan type, and what a lender charged, with the lender name hashed. No name, no address, no loan number, nothing that points back to you. The lender name is a salted hash, so the rows cannot be turned back into a list of names — by us or by anyone who obtained the table. That is a structure rather than a promise, which is why it is the version worth telling you.

What if my lender is annoyed that I negotiated?

Loan officers negotiate every day and expect to be countered. Being shown a competing quote is an ordinary part of the job in this business, not an insult — a loan officer who loses your file because you asked about a fee was going to be a difficult one to deal with at closing anyway.

The drafts we write are deliberately polite and specific. They name a line item and a number rather than making an accusation, which is both more effective and easier to send.

Are you a lender or a broker?

Neither. We are not a lender, a mortgage broker, an attorney, or a financial advisor, and nothing we produce is financial or legal advice. We never recommend a lender by name — we compare the quotes you bring us.

We also never contact a lender. There is deliberately no send button on our servers: we draft the emails, you read them, change them, and send them from your own account. That is the line between a coach and a broker and we stay on the right side of it.

What if my quote is already good?

Then we say so, plainly, and we do not invent a finding to justify a sale. A comparison that finds nothing wrong is a successful comparison.

And you will not have paid for it. Reading your quotes and building the comparison is free; you see the total we can justify asking for before you are asked for anything. If it comes in under our threshold there is no purchase offered at all — not a smaller price, not a button you have to talk yourself out of.

You see what we found before you pay. If it is under $500, there is nothing to buy. If something you need to know is not here, it is a gap in this page rather than a question we would rather not answer.