Show HN: SafeRate – AI chat-native mortgage lender
saferate.comHi HN, Dylan and Shima here. Today we're launching the first version of our project, Safe Rate, an AI-native mortgage lender going all in on the chat experience, at saferate.com.
Mortgage shopping is an uncomfortable experience. You have to share lots of sensitive data to get a single quote, and if you want to comparison shop, the rate aggregator websites straight up sell your data, so you end up with a lot of texts, emails, and phone calls from salespeople you've never met asking you to blindly trust them with a big financial decision.
Getting a mortgage quote should be on your terms. You should be able to share your relevant details anonymously and get real pricing. You should know how competitive the offer is before speaking with someone. And you should still be able to connect with a human if you need support.
So we've built a suite of tools in our AI chat to put shoppers in control:
1. Instant mortgage quoting without sharing any sensitive data (currently live for conventional loans in Illinois)
2. Automatically review a Loan Estimate, which every lender must provide you by law, and see how the estimate scores (0 to 100, benchmarked against 2 million loans). We then can make an instant competing offer so you know if we can save you money.
3. For refinances, share a mortgage statement to see if you can save money today, and if not, create a personalized tracker so you can be notified when rates have fallen
4. Mortgage Q&A for commonly asked mortgage questions. Still lots more to add!
5. Live - a Zoom-like call for mortgage shopping that instantly connects you with a loan officer while our AI assistant listens in, updates the quote details, and gets you pricing
We support this functionality in a variety of ways:
1. Chat on https://saferate.com
2. Email at buddy@saferate.ai
3. Live via our Zoom-like call tailored to mortgage shopping
4. Slackbot (please ask if you're interested in access)
5. Phone 1(888)850-6123
6. Coming soon RCS, SMS, and WhatsApp
Our chats are universal, so you can start with email and then transition to web chat, or vice versa, and it will retain the full context. And we've built our chat to be embeddable on any other website via an iframe. Safe Rate's main chat is actually an embedded iframe itself. And because we can't be wrong when giving a mortgage quote (regulation!) we've designed our AI so it does not hallucinate.
Here’s a 90 second demo video that shows this in action: https://youtu.be/6eIJukspmfU
You can also see a sample Live session: https://youtu.be/alAPtjUJ5xE
We're posting here today because any testing or feedback would be a great help. We're able to join the Live Call if you're brave enough (in addition to building this system ourselves, we're also licensed loan officers). And our quotes are only valid for Illinois with a max loan size of $806,500. We hope to expand nationally soon. Thanks!
How do you generate the quotes if you don't share personal details with the potential lenders?
For conventional loans in particular, pricing is pretty straightforward, and just depends on the different buckets you fall into. Pricing is mostly driven by credit score range, down payment amount, loan amount, property type, and number of units. You can see Fannie Mae's loan level price adjustments here (pdf): https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/9391/display
So our rates are accurate assuming the base info you shared is correct. When we have a completed application, if it turns out that your credit score that you shared is meaningfully different, or that the property is a condo and not a single family home, then the pricing may be different from what we shared.