Change Sciences, Inc., has released a new research report, Online Mortgage Customer Acquisition.  The report offers an in depth analysis of eleven lending websites.  The report ranks the sites, identifies best practice web design and addresses changes that lenders can make to improve their offerings online.

According to the report the top five ways successful websites take the visitors through the process are:

• Make it easy to get the mortgage process started

• Make it easy to see the differences across loan options

• Make it easy to understand the advantages of refinancing

• Make it easy to obtain a rate quote

• Make it easy to understand closing costs

National City, Bank of America and Wells Fargo earned top spots in the report.  Some of the least helpful included Wachovia, SunTrust and US Bank.  Other lenders included in the study were E-Trade, Chase, Citibank, ABN AMRO, and Washington Mutual.

We would have liked to have seen the Countrywide and E-Loan sites included as they are state of the art sites that could have produced some worthwhile benchmarking in the report.

What this means for you…online mortgage customer acquisition is getting more competitive as times goes on.  Some reports suggest that more than 80% of potential home buyers and refinancers go online for mortgage information.  Lenders that pay attention to the features that inform and ease the online process will be the winners in the web based acquisition race.