What we actually do to your quotes

A Loan Estimate is a standardized three-page federal form. We extract every field on it — the rate, the term, each fee line by name, the lock terms, the mortgage insurance structure — and record how confident we are in each one, along with the page it came from and the text we read.

Anything we are unsure about is flagged for you to check before it drives a single number. You can correct any field. Nothing we extracted is used in a calculation until you have had the chance to confirm it.

Before comparing anything, we verify each form's own arithmetic: that the line items in each section add up to the section total, that the totals add up to the subtotals, that the closing costs reconcile against the lender credit, and that the monthly payment actually follows from the amount, rate and term.

If any of that fails, we stop and show you which fields to check rather than producing a comparison built on a misread number. Usually the cause is that we read a digit wrong — occasionally it is that the form itself is wrong, which is worth knowing.

This is the part that matters most, and it is where most comparisons go wrong.

Roughly half of the closing costs on a Loan Estimate have nothing to do with the lender: property taxes, homeowner's insurance, recording fees, the escrow reserves collected at closing. Those are the same bills whichever lender you choose. They are also estimates, which means a lender can make its bottom line look smaller simply by guessing lower on your insurance.

So we compare on the origination charges and the services you cannot shop for, minus any lender credit — the numbers the lender actually sets. The rest is shown on the report, greyed out, with an explanation of why it is not counted. Not hidden. Just not counted.

Quotes at different point levels are not comparable as rates. Quotes with different lock periods are not the same product. Quotes issued three days apart may differ because the market moved, not because one lender is better. A fixed rate and an adjustable rate cannot be ranked against each other on cost at all.

We check all of that and tell you what we find. Where the mismatch makes a ranking meaningless, we refuse to produce one and show the quotes side by side instead. We never silently adjust a number to make quotes look comparable — an adjusted figure you cannot trace back to your own document is exactly the black box we exist to replace.

You tell us how long you expect to keep the loan. We amortize each quote, model when the mortgage insurance actually falls off — which differs sharply between a conventional loan and an FHA loan above 90% loan-to-value — and add up what you will really have paid: lender charges, plus interest, plus mortgage insurance.

Principal is not counted. That money becomes your equity, not a cost. Where our figure differs from the "In 5 Years" box printed on your form, we show both and explain exactly why they differ.

You get a sequenced plan: which lender to push on what, in what order, with the emails drafted, what each lender is likely to say back, and what to do if they say no. You send them from your own account. We never contact a lender.

Upload the revised quotes when they come in and we compute exactly what changed — what you saved up front and what you saved every month.