Lender rate sheets used to be simple.

Over three dozen government mortgage regulations later, lender rate sheets now look like:

Insurance rule changes, among other things, mean that finding the best rate for a client today can easily take three times longer than it did just a few years ago.

That’s the pain Lender Spotlight (www.lenderspotlight.ca) is trying to solve. The website, created by the folks at DocAssist, lets you enter a mortgage type, term, amount, LTV, etc., and instantly find the lowest published rates from the broker channel’s top lenders.

The system has 16 lenders on it so far and 25,000+ data points. Lender Spotlight says the data is updated constantly throughout the day and new products are added regularly.

We gave it a test drive today and it certainly earned the adjectives “fast” and “simple.” It’s a database with the potential to be quite useful, especially once the company adds more lenders and displays status rates (we noticed various unpublished rates that weren’t on the website).

Like competing products Mortgage Mentor and Lender Vault, a key benefit of Lender Spotlight is its ability to show you which lender does a specific type of deal. That’s handy for when you can’t remember them all. Sometimes you’ll find a lender you forgot about, or didn’t know about, and it’ll save your client money.

The site is free, so it’s certainly worth a look. If they can keep it accurate, add every prime broker-channel lender and add status broker rates (they are coming, says the company) then it’s a tool that will add value for the average broker.