No longer will consumers be able to google mortgage rate comparisons. As of Wednesday, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) had fully closed down its Advisor Mortgage platform, a comparison tool previously used to compare rates on mortgages across states.
In November, Google scaled back its geographic footprint to allow for mortgage rate searches in only five states and Washington, D.C.
A spokeswoman for Google Advisor, which launched its comparison ads program in 2009 and got into the mortgage leads business earlier in 2011, told RMD she was not able to comment on the matter at the time. However, in a search for mortgage rates in several states, a message popped up informing users that the Google Advisor mortgage rate product was not available at that time for those states.
“We’ve been prioritizing our product efforts across Google, which means taking a hard look at products that haven’t been as successful as we would have hoped,” spokeswoman Winnie King told National Mortgage News in an email. “To that end, we’ve closed down the mortgage search feature of Google Advisor and are focused on building continued improvements into the rest of the product.”
When Google initially changed course on its mortgage search products, however, speculation arose that it was a matter of state licensing, rather than success of the product.
Google continues to offer rate comparison search tools for credit cards, certificates of deposit and bank accounts.
Written by Elizabeth Ecker
