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Terms of Use

Last updated August 15, 2026

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your use of saferate.com and the services offered through it (the "Services"), operated by Safe Rate Inc. ("Safe Rate", "we", "us"). Read them before using the Services. By accessing or using the Services, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, stop using the Services.

What Safe Rate Is, and What It Is Not

Safe Rate does three things:

  • Publishes research on mortgage lenders and local mortgage pricing, including rankings and rate data built from public and licensed sources.
  • Lets you request quotes from lenders anonymously. Lenders see your loan scenario, a credit score band, and a geography. They do not see your name, contact details, exact credit score, or property address unless you later choose to share them.
  • Lets you build one Universal Loan Application and share it, on your terms, with the specific lenders you select.

Safe Rate Inc. is not:

  • A mortgage lender or mortgage broker. Safe Rate Inc. does not originate, fund, service, or broker loans. Its affiliate PartnerOwn LLC dba Safe Rate Mortgage is a licensed broker and lender in Illinois. See Affiliated Business Arrangement below.
  • A lead-generation marketplace. We do not sell your information or sell leads. See our Privacy Policy.
  • A party to any loan, quote, lock, or agreement between you and a lender.
  • A provider of legal, tax, accounting, or investment advice.

The Services are free for consumers. Our revenue comes from lender and broker subscriptions, described below.

Rates, Quotes, and No Commitment to Lend

Rates, payments, fees, and cost estimates shown on the Services are informational. They are estimates based on the assumptions in your scenario and on data that changes constantly. They are not offers of credit, not commitments to lend, and not a guarantee that any lender will approve you or honor any price.

Quotes you receive through the Services come from the lenders themselves. A quote is preliminary until the lender issues formal disclosures, including a Loan Estimate, and completes its own underwriting. Rate locks, expiration dates, and lender fees are set by the lender, not by Safe Rate. Your actual terms depend on a full application, verification of your information, credit review, appraisal, and the lender's own criteria.

We work to keep our data accurate and current, but we cannot warrant that published rates, lender information, rankings, or local statistics are complete, accurate, or timely. Verify anything you rely on directly with the lender.

Your Account

You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you provide and for activity under your account. Keep your sign-in credentials and magic links private. Tell us immediately at 312-248-0234 or team@saferate.com if you believe your account has been used without your permission.

You may close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate access to the Services, in whole or in part, if you violate these Terms or to protect the Services or other users. If we terminate your access, any application you have already submitted to a lender, and any agreement you have entered with a lender, remain between you and that lender.

Anonymous Quote Requests

When you request quotes, you authorize us to transmit your anonymous profile, which is your loan scenario, credit score band, and geography, to the lenders you select. You can preview exactly what is shared at your anonymous profile page.

Your identity stays with you until you decide otherwise. After a lender responds, you may choose to share your contact details with that specific lender so they can reach you. That choice is per lender and is yours alone to make. When you make it, you are asking that lender to contact you, and their own privacy and communication practices then apply.

Your Universal Loan Application

The Universal Loan Application is optional. Quote requests work without it.

If you build one, you keep ownership of your information. You grant Safe Rate a limited license to store, format, package, and transmit it solely to operate the Services and to deliver it to the lenders you designate, including converting it to industry-standard formats such as MISMO. We do not publicly display it, and we do not send it to anyone you have not designated.

You grant a lender access by issuing that lender a grant. Grants are per lender, may expire, and you may revoke a grant at any time. Revoking a grant stops future access. It cannot claw back information a lender already received or retained under its own obligations.

You are responsible for the accuracy and completeness of what you submit. Mortgage applications are legal documents, and providing false information on one can carry serious consequences. Do not submit information about another person unless you are authorized to do so.

Affiliated Business Arrangement

Safe Rate Inc. owns an affiliated mortgage lender, PartnerOwn LLC dba Safe Rate Mortgage, a licensed mortgage broker and lender (NMLS #1590949, Illinois Residential Mortgage Licensee MB.6761268), which operates only in Illinois. Because the two companies are commonly owned, Safe Rate Inc. benefits financially if you choose Safe Rate Mortgage as your lender.

You are not required to use Safe Rate Mortgage. There are other providers of these services, and you are free to shop around to determine that you are receiving the best services and the best rate. Safe Rate Mortgage is labeled with this disclosure wherever it appears on the Services, and our lender rankings are based on independent research, not on this affiliation. See Licensing & Disclosure and Methodology.

Safe Rate Mortgage holds a paid profile on the same terms, and at the same prices, as unaffiliated lenders. It receives no fee discount, no ranking benefit, and no placement benefit from the affiliation, and it pays any fee described in Lender and Broker Accounts on the same basis as every other lender.

Lender and Broker Accounts

This section applies if you use the Services on behalf of a lender, brokerage, or as a loan officer.

We currently charge for two things: premium profiles, which let a claimed lender, brokerage, or loan officer publish enhanced content and respond to quote requests, and premium placement, which is labeled promotional placement in specified geographies.

We may introduce additional fees for services we provide to lenders and brokers, such as a flat per-application transmission fee for packaging and delivering a completed application file that a shopper has directed us to send. A fee of that kind would be charged at the same flat amount for every transmission. It would not vary with the loan amount, the borrower, or the terms quoted, and it would not be contingent on whether you win, approve, or fund the loan. It is payment for the service of preparing and transmitting the file, never a payment for a referral or for access to consumer data.

We will give notice before any new fee takes effect, as described in Changes to these Terms. Fees are never charged to consumers.

Paying us cannot change where you rank. Rankings are computed from our published methodology. Paid placements are labeled as such and are presented separately from ranked results.

  • Subscriptions and billing. Subscriptions are billed in advance on a recurring basis through our payment processor and renew automatically until cancelled. Prices are set by us and are subject to change on notice. Fees already paid are non-refundable except where required by law.
  • Cancellation. You may cancel from your billing settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and premium features end at that point.
  • Eligibility and verification. You represent that you hold the licenses and NMLS registrations you claim, that they are current, and that you are authorized to act for the company whose profile you claim. We may verify this and may suspend or remove a profile that we cannot verify or that we believe is claimed without authority.
  • Your content. You retain ownership of the logos, photos, biographies, quotes, and other content you publish, and you grant Safe Rate a non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, display, and distribute it as part of the Services. You are responsible for having the rights to it and for its accuracy, including any advertised rates or terms, which must comply with applicable advertising, licensing, and fair-lending laws.
  • Consumer information. Information you receive about a shopper is subject to the conditions in Conditions on Receiving Shopper Information below, which are binding on you.

Conditions on Receiving Shopper Information

This section applies to lenders, brokerages, and loan officers. Shoppers use the Services because their information travels no further than the lenders they pick. Receiving a shopper's contact details or application file is therefore conditional on your agreement to every term in this section. If you do not accept these conditions, you must not accept the information. Accepting or using it is your agreement to them.

  1. Purpose limitation. You may use the information only to respond to that shopper's specific request, and, if the shopper proceeds with you, to process, underwrite, close, sell, and service the loan they asked about. Any other use requires the shopper's separate consent.
  2. No resale or onward transfer. You may not sell, rent, license, trade, or otherwise transfer the information to any third party for that third party's own purposes. This includes lead buyers, lead aggregators, marketing partners, data brokers, and your own corporate affiliates. It applies whether or not you receive payment.
  3. Permitted disclosures. Paragraph 2 does not prevent you from disclosing the information to your own service providers acting on your behalf under equivalent written restrictions, or to investors, insurers, guarantors, warehouse lenders, regulators, and others where disclosure is necessary to originate, sell, insure, or service the loan, or is required by law.
  4. No marketing lists. You may not add the shopper to a general marketing list or market unrelated products to them. Following up with that shopper about the request they made to you is not marketing for this purpose.
  5. Contact limits. Contact the shopper only through the channels they shared with you, honor any opt-out immediately, and comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, state telemarketing and mini-TCPA laws, and CAN-SPAM. A shopper choosing to share contact details with you is an invitation to respond to their request, not consent to be added to a dialer or campaign.
  6. Security. Protect the information with reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards, including those required by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Safeguards Rule. Notify us promptly if you learn of unauthorized access to information you received through the Services.
  7. Stop and delete. On request from the shopper or from us, stop using the information and delete it. This does not require you to delete records you are required to keep by law, including under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Regulation B, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, and state record-retention rules, or records relating to an application you have already acted on. Retained records stay subject to paragraphs 1 through 6.
  8. Enforcement. Breach of this section is a material breach of these Terms. We may suspend or terminate your account, revoke every outstanding grant of shopper information to you, remove your profile, and withhold refunds, in addition to any other remedy. Because information cannot be recalled once disclosed, you agree that damages alone may be inadequate and that we may seek injunctive relief.
  9. The shopper can enforce this directly. Each shopper whose information you receive is an intended third-party beneficiary of this section and may enforce it against you in their own name. No other part of these Terms creates third-party beneficiary rights.
  10. Survival. This section survives termination of your account and of these Terms, for as long as you hold the information.

Communications

By creating an account you agree to receive service and transactional messages by email, such as sign-in links, quote notifications, and account or security notices. These are part of the Services.

Marketing email is separate. Every marketing message includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops that category of marketing without affecting transactional messages.

If you provide a mobile number for verification codes or for alerts you have turned on, you consent to receive those text messages at that number. Message and data rates from your carrier may apply, and message frequency varies. Reply STOP to any message to opt out, or HELP for help. You may also opt out by calling 312-248-0234. An invalid or reassigned number is treated as a withdrawal of consent. We may change or discontinue text messaging at any time.

Rankings, Rate Data, and Licensing

Our lender rankings, scores, local rate indices, and the underlying methodology are Safe Rate's work product and are protected by intellectual property law. You may view them, and you may cite or quote them with attribution and a link.

You may not scrape, bulk download, redistribute, resell, or incorporate our rankings or rate data into another product or service without a license. Commercial licensing is available. See Local Mortgage Rate Index licensing or contact us.

Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

  • Use automated means to access, scrape, or copy the Services beyond what our robots directives permit
  • Interfere with, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Services or to another user's account
  • Submit false, misleading, or fraudulent information, or impersonate another person or company
  • Submit quote requests you do not intend to act on, or use the Services to harvest lender or consumer information
  • Post unlawful, defamatory, harassing, obscene, or infringing content
  • Use the Services in violation of any applicable law, including fair-lending, advertising, licensing, and privacy laws
  • Reverse engineer the Services or attempt to derive our underlying models or data sets

Intellectual Property

The Services and their content, including text, graphics, logos, software, analyses, and design, are owned by Safe Rate or its licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable license to access and use the Services for your own personal or internal business use. You may print or save copies for that purpose. All other rights are reserved.

Third-Party Sites and Content

The Services link to and display content from third parties, including lenders, brokerages, and data providers. We do not control those sites or that content, and a link is not an endorsement. If you follow a link, you do so at your own risk and subject to that operator's terms. We may remove a link at any time.

Availability

You are responsible for the hardware, software, connectivity, and services you need to access the Services. The Services may be unavailable from time to time because of maintenance, failures, or events outside our control. We are not responsible for losses arising from unavailability, from your inability to connect, or from limitations of your device, network, or internet provider.

Disclaimers

THE SERVICES AND ALL CONTENT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT RATES OR LENDER INFORMATION WILL BE ACCURATE OR CURRENT, OR THAT ANY LENDER WILL RESPOND TO YOU, QUOTE YOU, OR APPROVE YOU.

WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTS OR OMISSIONS OF ANY LENDER, BROKER, OR LOAN OFFICER, INCLUDING THE ACCURACY OF THEIR QUOTES, THEIR HANDLING OF YOUR INFORMATION AFTER YOU SHARE IT WITH THEM, OR THE TERMS THEY ULTIMATELY OFFER.

Limitation of Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SAFE RATE AND ITS AFFILIATES WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST SAVINGS, OR LOSS OF DATA, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICES, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICES WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE OR ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions or limitations, so they may not apply to you in full. In those jurisdictions our liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted by law.

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Safe Rate and its affiliates, officers, and employees from any claims, losses, expenses, demands, or liabilities, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of your use of the Services, your content, or your violation of these Terms or of any law. We may assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter subject to indemnification by you, at our expense, and you will cooperate. You may not settle any such claim without our written consent.

Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois and applicable federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. You and Safe Rate agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Cook County, Illinois, and waive any objection to venue there.

If you are a consumer, nothing in this section deprives you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection provisions of the law of the state where you reside, and nothing in these Terms waives any right you have under those laws.

General

If any provision of these Terms is held invalid, the rest remains in effect and the Terms are read as if the invalid provision were not included. Our failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. Headings are for convenience only. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any terms presented with a specific feature, are the entire agreement between you and Safe Rate regarding the Services.

Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms, including the fees and features available through the Services. We will change the "last updated" date above, and we will provide additional notice where required by law. Your use of the Services after the effective date of a change means you accept it. Review these Terms periodically.

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