Zillow to Buy Mortgage Lender to Help With Its Home Flipping
Zillow to Buy Mortgage Lender to Help Its Home-Flipping Business
(Bloomberg) -- Zillow Group Inc. started buying and selling homes this year. Now it plans to write mortgages, too.
The home-listings website operator is acquiring Mortgage Lenders of America, an Overland Park, Kansas-based lender, Zillow said in a statement Monday. The terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed.
Zillow, whose shares tumbled in after-hours trading Monday following forecasts reflecting pressure on its core business, has been building out a program in which home sellers can upload information to its website and solicit an offer for their home. After Zillow buys a house, it makes any repairs and lists it on the open market. Offering mortgages is intended to “streamline the process for people who buy a Zillow-owned home,” Greg Schwartz, president of media and marketplaces, said in the statement.
In its second-quarter report, Zillow lowered its forecasts for full-year sales and Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Clark in New York at pclark55@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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