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Is there room for more consumer oriented mortgage rate comparison tools in the marketplace today? If so, what features are lacking … if any.

A non-exhaustive search of the current rate comparison tools shows that a large percentage are tied to specific brokers, or lenders. This is not a problem, if the site is transparent regarding this relationship. A couple of tools / sites that appear to be independent (this is by no means a complete list of sites) are the following:

http://www.ratesupermarket.ca/,https://www.kanetix.ca/ and http://www.ratehub.ca/

All of these sites give a wide range of products, and lenders. One interesting feature that www.ratehub.ca mentions is a consumer auction site that is coming in the near future (Spring 2011). It will be interesting to see how well this concept is received by the broker, and lender community. It would seem that a rate auction site would tend to detract from the benefits that a professsional (IE. broker / lender salesforce) brings to the consumer. However, for someconsumers that are only driven by rate, this type of facility seems to be long overdue.