Improving Lead Quality at Ellie Mae

We announced this morning a significant partnership with Ellie Mae, a giant in the mortgage industry. Ellie Mae provides desktop productivity and loan processing software to more than 130,000 loan officers and mortgage brokers nationwide, so this opens up significant new channels for HouseValues to accelerate sales of our mortgage products.

In talking with Ellie Mae about this partnership, we learned some interesting things about current mortgage industry perception of online leads. According to a survey commissioned by Ellie Mae, of the 50 percent of mortgage brokers who buy online leads, less than half of them are happy with what they currently receive. In fact, 60 percent of brokers surveyed were unhappy with the quality of their online mortgage leads.

This, according to Richard Fienberg from Ellie Mae, is a big reason why they chose to partner with HouseValues.

"Through this partnership with HouseValues, we’re providing brokers a better option for online leads,” he said in this morning's press release.