Anonymity was the key to the success of Zestimate.

I’m not sure anyone given a free real credit score would ever really believe their info. would not be used down the road.

Maybe the solution is to tell folks they have built a ‘credit score modeler’…where the client answers a bunch of anonymous question about their credit histories…and the modeler “estimates” their score.

Bankrate offers something like that…Zillows would have to be “better” somehow…but then folks could play around with it at will and actually do it anonymously…

My 2 cents…

Great post!

More transparency is more important. This enable people to go around the bait and switch. But how provide or enable more transparency? Start with user feedback; comments, ratings, etc. These are strong incentives for lenders to provide more accurate information. I think a platform such as Smart Hippo can provide more granular data points to lenders and visitors.

From my brief comparison of lenders rates on Smart Hippo and other site the same lenders on the first site provide more accurate rates than other site.

With the mountain of data Smart Hippo can have they could present the information in any way they want or the visitor would want to search and see results.

As for the issue of having people only look for rates every few years there are ways to make it relevant more often to users. Just think about it!

Give away the score to get a subscriber. Not just any subsciber either. We’re talking about someone ready to entrust their financial identity to you. They wouldn’t give it to you if they knew you were going to sell it. they may as well shop at Lending Tree.

Each subscriber has a far higher earning potential than just selling the information as a lead.

This is explained further in Part 2 of this article. I posted it earlier this week

How can they resist that healthy profit if they paid the repositories for the score?

Where is their profit coming from currently, and where is it going to come from under this Zcore model?

It should go without saying that a consumer doesn’t want his most personal financial information shared with strangers until he’s good and ready to actually move on applying for a home loan. It should also go without saying that the anonymous nature of the web is what makes it so successful. Instead of fighting this fact, we need to embrace it as Gavin suggests. Connecting consumers to existing and fast-emerging companies and technologies that will increase, not decrease anonymity. And Zillow is a great portal through which to start doing this. The future our our business has to be more about marketing and delivering stellar customer service, not about being an information hoarder.

A snapshot blended credit score is a good idea. If Fair Isaac was going to offer a blended credit score without the full report, they would want some sort of transaction fee.

I don’t think today’s consumer would be averse to this. There are companies today that offer to sell a full mortgage credit report directly to the applicant without them re-selling their information for marketing purposes. The only way for someone to be truly anonymous is to pay the fee themselves, because if someone else picks up the tab, they are going to capture their information as a lead, and sell it.

And hey, where is that Zillow fellow anyway?

The Google Alert has sounded!

Dan – I’ll still be interested to see what Zillow comes up with. Hopefully it will brake the mold.

Todd, I think you’re onto something with this.