Mortgage planners have two challenges when determining the best mortgage for clients.  The first is that lender’s products and rates are always changing and it’s tough for some planners to keep up.  The second is that tricky deals sometimes require time consuming lender research.

In the past few years two companies have launched products to ameliorate these problems:  Beacon Buddy and Rate Results.  Both companies aggregated lender information and let brokers search for mortgages that matched their client’s needs.  In a sense they were search engines for mortgage planners. 

We always thought these services were both great concepts.  Apparently so did others.  As of last July, RateResults for example said it had 3000 brokers signed up. 

Unfortunately, it seems something was wrong with their business models because their websites are apparently shut down.  The sense we get from talking to people who’ve used these services is that the data was too often inaccurate.  Indeed, Beacon Buddy admits it outright on their homepage:

“Due to extreme changes in Lender and Product offering Data and the difficulty we have experienced gathering this information, it has been determined that the likely search results are not sufficiently reliable.”

There may have been other reasons for their problems as well–specifically pertaining to their ad-revenue model (RateResults) and subscription revenue model (Beacon Buddy).  In any case, we’re sorry to see them go so soon.

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Story update:  Please see these comments.