In a Nutshell
pros
- Partner with a lot of lenders to choose from
- Very easy process
- Able to do a cash-out refinance
cons
- Not a direct lender
- No customer service number
USA Rate Center at a Glance
| Direct lender or marketplace? | Marketplace |
| Loan types: | New home purchase, mortgage refinance |
| Featured Loan: | Home loan refinance |
| Repayment terms: | Varies |
| Minimum Down Payment: | Varies |
| Minimum Credit Score: | Varies |
| Suitable for: | Rate shoppers |
Overview
USA Rate Center is an online home loan marketplace that connects you with a variety of different lenders to help you find rates and terms for both purchasing a new home or refinancing your existing home loan. The website is simple and easy to navigate - and after answering just a few brief questions, you can receive a list of lenders to choose from. The focus from USA Rate Center is to find you the most appealing possible rates so you can save money. In fact, on their website, they advertise that you could save over $3,200 a year if you refinance right now.
Suitable For?
While you’re able to find a new home loan through USA Rate Center, we really like it for refinancing your existing home loan. I personally went through the process to test it out and was able to get six different lenders to offer me a low rate within about four minutes. So if you’re looking to lower your payment, take cash out, get a better rate, or any combination of the three, USA Rate Center may be a good option to consider.
Types of Loans/Products
Since USA Rate Center is a home loan marketplace, they themselves don’t offer any loans or products - but the lenders they connect you with do. Being that there are many lenders they work with, and each lender will be different, it’s hard to say exactly which types of loans and products are offered specifically. It’s fair to say that all lenders they work with, however, offer home loans (most of them have conventional 30-year and 15-year mortgages, some have other options like jumbo loans or ARM loans), as well as home loan, refinance loans. For instance, one of the lenders I got was Quicken - and as we know already, they offer just about every type of home loan available.
The Application Process
The application process is incredibly simple. In fact, once you land on the USA Rate Center website, you’re already at the start of the process. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but then after going through the steps I realized how simple it was and I appreciated not having to wade through a bunch of sales or informational pages I didn’t need when I knew what I was looking for (in this case, a refinance).
Here are the steps:
- From the main page, select if you want to do a New Purchase or a Refinance (for the sake of this review, I am going to go through the refinancing process)
- Estimate the value of your home (they use a slider to make it easy to pick a rough estimate)
- Estimate how much you owe on your mortgage (hint: an easy way to check this if you don’t want to find a mortgage statement is by simply pulling your credit report up through a service like Credit Karma -- they’ll give you the last reported balance on your loan)
- Answer if you want to take cash out with your refinance (you can take up to $100,000)
- Estimate your credit score - poor, fair, good, or excellent (they give you FICO score ranges for each to simplify this part, too)
- Answer if you or your spouse have served in the military (this gives you access to additional lenders and discounts)
- Enter your home address
- Provide your first name, last name, and email address
- Provide your phone number
- Get matched with partners
It’s really quite simple -- after you go through those steps, you’ll get a list of mortgage lenders to choose from. Each lender will have a high-level summary with a link to get a rate quote.
Rates and Terms
Again, because USA Rate Center is a mortgage loan marketplace, not a direct lender, the rates and terms will vary greatly based on the lender you choose, the time of year you refinance, your credit score, your loan-to-value ratio, and much more. The right way to get an accurate idea of the rates and terms you’ll qualify for is to go through USA Rate Center’s quick process and select a lender to get a free rate quote from.
Lowest mortgage rates at end-June 2020 were:
For refinancing your home loan, the rates at the end of June 2020 were:
- 10 year fixed refinance - 2.875%
- 15 year fixed refinance - 2.750%
- 20 year fixed refinance - 3.000%
- 30 year fixed refinance - 3.000%
Help & Support
One major downside to USA Rate Center is they do not offer any help and support by way of customer service. The site itself is owned by Best Rate Holdings, LLC dba Best Rate Referrals. If you follow the links to the parent website, you can get in touch with them, but it’s more of a holding company - not a company that can help you with your refinance. Remember, USA Rate Center really just acts as a liaison to find you low rates on a home loan. You should contact customer service for the lender you ultimately choose to go with.
Summary
USA Rate Center offers a fast and simple service, with no frills, to connect you to home loan lenders where you can find the most appealing rates possible, based on your creditworthiness. If you’re exploring the idea of refinancing and don’t know which lender to choose, USA Rate Center definitely makes it easy to shop around through their simplified process.