Online mortgages growing slower than expected

Jupiter Research has scaled back its forecast for the proportion of mortgages that are initiated online. Jupiter now thinks that only 5% of purchase mortgages and 8% of refinance mortgages will originate online by 2009. Mortgage originations were expected to be a natural target for e-commerce. So what's happening?

Jupiter's reduction to its forecast is a reaction to lower than expected growth in mortgage originations in 2004. Slower than expected growth in 2004 was due to:

• Limited efforts from large mortgage lenders to migrate consumers online.
• The damaging impact of spam. Spam emails that advertise online mortgages that sound too good to be true are alienating customers and making them more nervous to provide personal information to online providers.

Information via eWeek; full article here.