Get real mortgage quotes without handing over your phone number or your Social Security number.

Who we are

The problem we set out to fix

Mortgage shopping runs on an information asymmetry. To get a single real quote, you are asked to hand over your personal information first: your contact details, and in some cases your Social Security number. The result is predictable. You get spammed for weeks just for trying to learn the interest rate, the experience is miserable, and you never controlled the data in the first place. It sits with the lender, or with a marketplace that collected it and has likely sold it many times over.

Here is what that requirement was never about: the quote. We have priced loans ourselves, and pricing one has never once required a borrower's email. The email was always about capturing you as a lead, not about answering your question.

The principles we built on

So we started from three simple ideas.

There is no single best lender

We also believe there are far more good lenders than most borrowers ever see, and many of them fly under the radar because they don't spend heavily on marketing. A large national lender might have the best technology. A credit union might have the best pricing. An independent mortgage broker might know a niche product cold, or run a faster, cleaner process. Which of those matters most depends entirely on you. Some borrowers need to close fast. Others want to save every possible dollar on a refinance. There is no one size that fits all of it.

So rather than convince you there is a single best lender, we help you shop. We surface the strengths that matter most to your situation and let you compare from there. And because it is free for any lender to be quoted on Safe Rate, everyone can take part, from the largest national lenders to the single-person broker-owner down the street. That is why our rankings are genuinely diverse: a credit union might lead in one city, a wholesale lender working through local brokers in another. The best lender is the one that is best for you, not the one that spent the most to be seen.

What the data can't see

Our rankings are built on data, but a mortgage still comes down to people, and some things never show up in a spreadsheet. The loan officer who went to your school, or speaks your first language, or simply puts you at ease. Some capabilities are hard to capture in the numbers we have, too. One lender can close your refinance virtually, another can't yet, and if you are out of town caring for a sick family member, that single detail can outweigh everything else.

So we let lenders build premium profiles to show the parts of their work the data misses. A premium profile changes what you can learn about a lender. It never changes where that lender ranks.

Where we come from

Safe Rate® was founded by Dylan Hall and Shima Rayej. We met during our MBA at the University of Chicago, on a study abroad at the London School of Economics, and realized we had been circling the same problem from opposite sides.

Dylan had been a research assistant for House of Debt, the Financial Times Book of the Year on the 2008 subprime collapse, and has led engineering teams at three startups. Shima had come from Wall Street, where she structured mortgage products in the years after the crisis, and before business school had built AI systems for autonomous military vehicles. One of us had studied how badly mortgage incentives can fail. The other had worked inside the machine that priced them.

What we built

A place to compare lenders on data nobody can pay to reorder, and to do it on your own terms: anonymously, with your information under your control, and without starting over every time you talk to someone new. Comparison shopping for the largest loan of your life, the way every other major purchase has worked for years.

Our goal is simple. We want a mortgage industry centered on the consumer experience, not the cutthroat, high-pressure sales process so many people brace for today.

Our team