Chase Home Lending and Google recently announced a partnership whereby the organizations are collaborating to see how and what people are searching to find more information about homeownership.
The “Search for Home Snapshot,” available here, offers insights that show consumers are clicking their way to finding their first home and figuring out how much they can afford. Data show that search activity for first-time homebuying mortgages are at an all-time high, and affordability continues to reign as the top priority for prospective buyers. The “Search for Home Snapshot” also found Southerners are Googling mortgage information more than consumers in other regions, and fixed-rate mortgages are still the preferred product for many searchers.
“We teamed up with Google to help us better understand what customers are searching for and how the home buying landscape is evolving,” says Mike Weinbach, CEO of Chase Home Lending. “We found that millennials and first-time homebuyers are making a big splash in the market, and affordability remains top of mind.”
“For many people, the homebuying process is filled with research. For Millennials and first-time homebuyers, we know it’s particularly complex, and they often turn to Google for answers to their questions about financing, for example,” says Suzie Reider, managing director of financial services for Google. “There’s an opportunity to make that process easier by bringing attention to the key questions and issues homebuyers have today.”
Some key findings from the “Search for Home Snapshot” include the following:
- Searches around first-time homebuying topics keep climbing. In 2017, 44% of searches in the mortgage category are for first-time buyer mortgages, up 11% from last year.
- Homebuyers are more concerned about what they can afford and are crunching the numbers. Last year, consumers made 34% more searches around affordability than the year before.
- In the last three years, the South generated 37% of mortgage searches, compared to 26% in the West, 19% in the Northeast and 18% in the Midwest.
- Florida searchers checked out fixed-rate mortgages 30% more this year than last, compared to increases of 18% in New York, 9% in Illinois and 6% in California.