Lending Tree Review

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Last Updated on: 24th March 2023, 11:57 pm

Lending Tree
Lending Tree - byDavid Crowder, April 1, 2011
4/ 5stars
on
Lending Tree
Review Summary :

Lending Tree provides a fantastic service to consumers and investors alike with their ultimate credit and lending marketplace. Consumers receive reverse auction-style bidding for their loan business and a free credit report, while investors and lenders gain the ability to make loans without having to spend a small fortune obtaining clients. This makes it a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Pros:

  • You are connected with a wide variety of loan officers and lenders.
  • These lenders actually compete in a reverse auction-style for your business giving you the best possible interest rate for your loan.
  • Lending Tree provides you with free and helpful services such as consumer education and free credit reports.
  • Lending Tree maintains an extensive database of real customer reviews on their various affiliated lenders, some of which contain hundreds and even thousands of helpful reviews.

Cons:

  • Once you are matched with a lender, you are no longer dealing directly with Lending Tree.
  • Lending Tree customer service can not tell you anything about any of their lenders, since they do not work for the company but are only affiliated businesses.
  • The whole underwriting and lending process is different from one lender to the next.
Quick Facts about Lending Tree
Reviewed By:David Crowder
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Thanks to the rise of Peer to Peer Funding like Lending Tree, it is much easier to obtain an unsecured loan now than ever before. With these signature loans, you can now receive the funding that you want without having to go through a lot of complicated motions or without needing to hand over collateral such as a car or house. Personal loans such as those offered by Lending Tree are a terrific and quick way to get that cash, so long as you fully comprehend the inner workings of such loans and you can comfortably service the payments on the amount that you elect to borrow.

Lending Tree is fairly unique in the P2P space because it maintains a large and geographically diversified base of lenders who compete against one another in a reverse auction style of lending. They make this their motto, “When banks compete, you win.” Lending Tree is extremely helpful in obtaining a loan also because it handles all of the complicated upfront work on your behalf and delivers you a nice variety of quotes in an effort to win your business.

Lending Tree Intro & Background

Lending Tree, Inc. proves to be the leading marketplace for online loans in the country. They are proud of their ability to offer consumers like you a plethora of information and tools that make it possible for you to obtain the best possible loan for yourname of the founder(s) and upper management of the company as well as a brief info on them and their background current needs. Their online marketplace links you up with a number of different lenders who literally compete against one another for your loan business. This is how they empower you to comparison shop your way through a complement of credit and loan offerings. The people at Lending Tree have helped to facilitate over 55 million individual loan inquiries since they opened up their doors. Besides personal unsecured loans, the company also gives one-stop-shop level access to lending firms that provide car loans, business loans, home equity lines of credit and home equity loans, and outright home loans.

Lending Tree Founder and Management Team

CEO and Founder Doug Lebda desired to purchase his first townhouse home back in 1996. Even though he was an accountant, he found out the hard way how difficult and time-consuming it was to go bank to bank in search of the best offer and rates to buy his house. He decided to launch a service where banks would instead compete for consumers' lending business instead of the other way around. The company went national in 1998, IPO'ed successfully in 2000, and was acquired by Barry Diller and his media company InteractiveCorp. in 2003. Today Doug is once again the CEO of the recently re-spun off company he founded nearly 20 years ago.

Chief Financial Officer Gabriel Dalporto brings 18 years of financial services and marketing experience to the table as CFO. Formerly Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Zecco Holdings the online brokerage, he served previously as VP for Marketing at E*Trade Financial, helping to turn around the company after the dot-com collapse, and as VP for marketing at JP Morgan Chase Bank.

Chief Operating Officer Nikul Patel graduated from the famed Wharton School of Business and co-founded Movoto.com, a real estate website search engine. Before that he worked 12 years for Intel Corporation in senior management.

Chief Revenue Officer Neil Salvage has 15 years of both sales and business development experience, serving with such companies as CBS Television and Radio's Head of Digital Sales, Citysearch Executive Vice President, and Yellowpages.com's first Vice President.

Lending Tree Loans

Something that sets Lending Tree apart from the other crowdfunding lenders in the space is the wide variety of loans that they offer their customers. Lending tree provides many more types of credit than just personal unsecured loans. They also feature:

Business Loans – Lending Tree will match you with a lender who will help you to get approved and funded for a loan quickly, not in months. Factors considered for the amount of a business loan include time in business, annual revenue of your company, and your personal credit score.

Auto Loans – You can do comparisons on various kinds of auto loans, such as used car loans, new car loans, and even refinancing auto loans. It does not matter to them whether you are purchasing from a private seller or an auto dealer.

Home Loans Refinancing – Whether you are interested in reducing your payoff time or reducing your monthly payments, Lending Tree has all the tools you will need to make a right decision and receive offers for better home loans than your current one.

Home Loans – Lending Tree can deliver as many as five different free offers for home loans within a matter of minutes. This applies to people who are purchasing an investment home, vacation home, primary residence, or getting a first time loan.

How Lending Tree Works

After you go through the prequalification for a personal loan, Lending Tree sets you up with a host of lenders who are all willing and able to provide you with an unsecured or other type of loan. All that you have to do after that is to line up your side by side offers to compare which is better and to have an understanding of the rates at which these mortgage companies will provide you with funds.

Investors who work with Lending Tree as lenders are able to partner with them to obtain leads. Lending Tree promises connection with their database of 30 million borrowers. These kinds of seriously interested live leads can not be had from any other source, so they claim. Thanks to their partnership with you, your company gains instant credibility with the borrower who knows and trusts Lending Tree and the outfits for which they vouch. You will then be matched up with interested borrowers who are requesting personal loans so that you can make your offer of best interest rate based on their applying criteria.

Lending Tree Services

  • Cutting Edge Filters – Permit you to find the precise kinds of borrowers that you require at the same times as you eliminate the ones that do not fit your profile.
  • Canopy – Using this lender portal section, you are able to choose wisely the leads you will buy. You can also look at live data in order to efficiently plan your leads management and capacity for lending.
  • Market-based Pricing – The model for pricing with Lending Tree is determined by the market demand.
  • Account Management – Lending Tree account managers are happy to supply expertise and support for expanding and improving your business so that you can be a success with them.
  • Lending Tree University – Lending Tree's university teaches courses on leadership and sales. These are designed around proven and practical approaches that are central to the management and sales processes. They also provide consultation services for your specific business.
  • Certified Lender & Loan Officer Programs – You can set yourself apart from the competition using the Certified Loan Officer and Certified Lender Programs.

Lending Tree Location(s)

Lending Tree's corporate and main office is found in Charlotte, North Carolina. They do not maintain branch offices. Each of the lenders who works with them as an affiliate has their own offices at various places around the country.

Lending Tree Interface Screenshots

Lending Tree Safety

Lending Tree utilizes secure encrypted 128 bit SSL technology for transmissions on all data it transmits between itself and lenders, banks, real estate agents, and loan brokers. They also firewall off their servers at a few different places in the system. This includes the points between their servers and the internal production networks, the database servers, and your computer.

Lending Tree Complaints and Ratings

Lending Tree is well-regarded by the Better Business Bureau. They give Lending Tree an A- rating based on their amount of time they have been in business, their reasonable numbers of complaints for a company this size, their responses to the complaints that were lodged, and their resolution of these complaints. Lending Tree had 357 complaints lodged against it in the previous three years.

Lending Tree Customer Support

As we spoke with Lending Tree, we were suitably impressed with their customer service. Their agents helped with eagerness in answering our questions as they knew the answers. They were less aware about the specifics of particular lenders regarding whom we asked, as the company connects consumers with lenders but has nothing to do with the loan from this point forward.

As far as what Lending Tree actually handles for consumers, they gather the information from you on your desired loan amount, down payment that you can afford, employment and credit history, your debt to income ratio, and other critical personal data. They automatically input all of this important financial information into their computers then give you the loan offers and lenders that match your profile. This is all done instantaneously, and it is the end of the Lending Tree personal involvement in your process. From here forward, you work directly with the individual lender whom you select. This lender generally will finalize the processing and underwriting procedures in less than a month's time.

Lending Tree's website also provides a great amount of helpful education in the form of customer support. Here they offer useful information and instruction along with helpful financial advice. Included is a selection of many different reviews for each lender they work with, provided by actual customers who dealt with the lender in question. We were amazed by the fact that some of these lending companies have literally thousands of reviews.

Lending Tree Costs & Fees

We love the fact that Lending Tree is not charging any sort of fee at all for matching you up as a borrower with one of their lenders. The fact that they promise they would never do this, and that none of their lenders would ask for any fees upfront either, is very confidence building and reassuring.

As far as the interest rates that the various lenders with Lending Tree are charging, the best case scenarios are for fixed rates from 4% to 4.25% and for variable rates starting at 3.6%. Regarding bank fees and closing costs, every lender has a different fee schedule. Some do not charge anything for this category, while others could charge as much as $1,200.

Final Words on Lending Tree

Lending Tree is a very convenient service whose goals are to provide consumers with a win-win situation of banks competing for their business and thereby giving them the very best rates possible and to provide lenders and investors with an opportunity to become involved like banks in a form of Peer to Peer lending without the hassle of having to build up a brand and spend countless thousands of dollars in marketing and advertising to develop their own customer base. We like best about Lending Tree that it does not charge any form of fee to match you the consumer up with the lender that works best for your personal situation. Their customer service is excellent too, though they do not have any ability tocontrol that of their lenders, who after all are merely affiliated investors and not employees.

Lending Tree
Lending Tree - byDavid Crowder, April 1, 2011
4/ 5stars
on
Lending Tree
Review Summary :

Lending Tree provides a fantastic service to consumers and investors alike with their ultimate credit and lending marketplace. Consumers receive reverse auction-style bidding for their loan business and a free credit report, while investors and lenders gain the ability to make loans without having to spend a small fortune obtaining clients. This makes it a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Have you purchased products from Lending Tree? Leave a review!

Leave your rating

Field is Required

Field is Required

Field is Required

Field is Required

Leave a rating:

David Crowder
David Crowder

W.D. Crowder is an American published author. His background and areas of expertise include history, economics, expatriate living, international relations, investments and personal finance. A widely read and top of his class graduate of Stetson University, he obtained his bachelor of arts degree in History with minors in Latin American Studies and International Relations and a special emphasis in Economics. He was President of his Phi Alpha Theta (National History Honors Fraternity) Stetson University chapter and a Phi Beta Kappa (National Honors Fraternity) member.

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