Search of the Day: Mortgages

Mortgages. They’ve been in the news a lot lately, some blaming lenders for the current crisis, others blaming poor decision making. They’re like asses and excuses, everyone has one and they all stink. Let’s see if people’s general search patterns shed any light on these important but despised parts of our lives.

Surprisingly, ‘mortgages’ is not the most searched-for term in this set. Topping the list is ‘mortgage calculator’ with an average of 1 million searches per month – the largest average I’ve seen. Let’s put that in perspective: ’sex videos’ averages the same number. This term peaks in ‘January’ while ‘mortgage’ (at a stratospheric 843,000 per month) peaks in June – presumably people just doing their research well ahead of time…of course, ‘bad credit mortage’ (19,100) peaks in January, also, and ‘refinance mortgage’ (33,100) hits its stride right before ‘mortgage’.

Last year’s term of the year, ’subprime mortgage’ averages 14,800 queries per month, whereas ‘adjustable rate mortgage’ – which is the prettier phrase for how we got here – sits at 12,100. The less sexy but far more stable ‘fixed rate mortgage’ brings in a paltry 5,400 – about half of the volume of ‘interest only mortgage’, an absolute horror of a deal, and a quarter of the volume for ’second mortgage’ at 22,000 per month.

Now, I know that there’s a lot of generic traffic that’s not looking for anything frightening or even specific at all. Hell, the lowest-traffic generic term – home mortgage – is five times the volume for second mortgage. But these numbers opened my eyes a bit to exactly how many people were looking for shady, rotten or outright bad deals that were designed to help in the short term while shafting you over the long haul. There were a lot of jerk banks involved in this who shouldn’t have been making loans they couldn’t have possibly thought would actually get paid out. Lord knows that one of the few banks to come out clean and sober from all of this tried to get us to take out a loan that we couldn’t have afforded for very long just a few short years ago. But to me it looks like there has been plenty of consumer activity around the kinds of mortgage plans that are specifically designed to get you in trouble, too.

Read your contracts and your fine print, people. From a guy in a business that lives and dies on contract terms, for the love of God, read your mortgage paperwork. Every. Last. Piece. Of. Paper. They. Send You.

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

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