A new online mortgage finding startup has teamed up with UK property site Zoopla to provide a more integrated house hunting experience.
Trussle, launched earlier this year, has now been in a partnership with Zoopla for over a month. The idea is that house buyers would be able to undergo a quick assessment in order to gain a mortgage-in-principle certificate.
They could then use this mortgage assessment as a search option on the Zoopla site in order to narrow down possibilities in an area. “We can show you how much you can borrow in under five minutes,” says Ishaan Malhi, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Trussle. “So now instead of just saying you can have £300,000, or Zoopla showing all the houses available in your area, we can show you context of what it all means.”
The startup also provides an instant alert service for re-mortgagers. This service continually compares a list of user mortgages – Trussles says it currently has details of around £300,000,000 in mortgages from registered users – to changing offerings. If a deal comes up that can save a user money, it send them an email, Malhi says.
“We recently had a user who got approved on mortgage a few months ago but the system flagged up the impact of Brexit (the UK vote to leave the EU) on reducing rates,” he adds. “The customer was still in the pipeline and could benefit from a more competitive mortgage. It dropped by .25%, which saved them £300 a month over a two year fixed term deal. That’s more than £7,000 saved over the intro period due to the continual alert system.”
Malhi asserts that Trussle does not discriminate between mortgages. The startup gets a commission of a fraction of the total mortgage price from the lender once a deal is signed. How big a fraction differs from lender to lender but that is not factored into the site’s algorithms, he adds.
Trussle will also share revenue with Zoopla from any successfully completely mortgage driven to it from the property website. Eventually Malhi would like Trussle to serve as a one-stop-shop for comparing all aspects of purchasing property.
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House buyers still face significant costs on a variety of areas outside a mortgage – for example, conveyancing, surveying and other aspects of real estate law. But there is no easy way to compare abilities and pricing in these areas, he says.
And it will not be long before more aspects of the property sector are available through online disruptors. The process started with property and tenant search tools and has recently moved on into online estate agents as well as real estate investment tools.
Mortgages are the next step and then startups will use technology to optimise even more real estate services, Malhi says. “I think it’s important to bear in mind that in the UK people are increasingly coming to expect services that are stripping away complexity,” he adds. “We’ve seen this manifesting in energy and broadband where you continually have services finding the optimal provider. Now translate that into the biggest financial commitment you’ll ever have where instead of saving £20 on your broadband, you’ll be saving £2,000 per year.”
