Thousands of lenders know your credit score, but it's probably a mystery to you. E-Loan (www.eloan.com), an online lending company, will now tell you your score in confidence within minutes, and at no cost. Creditors use the score as a quick gauge of how big a credit risk you are. Key factors: whether you pay your bills on time, the size of the loan you're requesting relative to your collateral, and how much you owe other lenders. The three-digit score, compiled by Fair, Isaac & Co., ranges from 300 to 900, with 80% to 85% of consumers falling between 600 and 800 (A score of 620 or higher is considered desirable.) Critics say the raw score alone could be misleading, but E-Loan includes explanatory information on its site.Score! Lenders check your credit score when deciding whether to give you a loan and, if so, how much you'll pay for the privilege. The higher your score, the lower the interest rate attached to your loan. Now you can check on your score on the Web--free--at E-Loan (www.eloan.com). The site offers solid information on how scores are determined and how you can improve your credit score. For example, closing unused credit card accounts might be worth a few points. Despite increasing clutter, home buyers and sellers can find HELP IN CYBERSPACE. THERE IS NO doubt about it: The Internet has changed the home-buying and -selling experience. It is now possible to waste more time fooling around with realty Web sites than you spend looking at houses. While there are some useful sites, cyberspace is overflowing with empty promises. Some sites that promise to link you up with a real estate agent or deliver a quote on a homeowners insurance policy just dump you into online classified ads--after you've answered pages of questions about yourself, your home and even (for an insurance quote that failed to materialize) the avoirdupois of the family pooch. Despite such clutter, a few sites are well worth a visit: IOwn.com. This all-purpose site is the best one overall, with a broad range of useful features for buyers and sellers. IOwn is licensed as a mortgage lender or broker nationwide (except in New Jersey) and searches for loans from among 25 lenders. You can apply online free or, if you get cold feet in cyberspace, you can call a toll-free number (877-669-4696) and apply over the phone. First-timers will especially appreciate the logical arrangement of home-buying information, starting with tips for estimating how much you can afford and ways to pull together a down payment. Want to check your credit status? You can instantly download a copy of your Experian credit report for $8. For $29.95, you can have that report--plus reports from the two other major credit bureaus--mailed to you. It's a good idea to review your reports before you apply for a mortgage so you have time to correct mistakes or close unneeded lines of credit that might cause a lender to boost your interest rate. IOwn.com allows you to do a free search of recent sale prices in neighborhoods you're considering. Its "Find a Neighborhood" feature offers detailed reports on three local schools; the reports are free if you agree to let one of the sponsors contact you by phone or e-mail (otherwise, you'll pay $39.95). We took the free offer, but we answered "no" to questions about plans to sell or move, and were not contacted--at least not in the week after getting the report. The site's HomeWatch service offers e-mail notification of new listings, but it draws on a database of only 600,000 homes--fewer than listings leader Realtor.com, which claims more than 1.3 million, and runner-up HomeAdvisor. com, which claims 800,000. Skip the AgentFinder feature on iOwn.com. It yields an alphabetical list of agents with Web sites and phone numbers, but offers no explanation why they were selected. Our search for Arlington, Va., yielded 39 agents spread out across a two-state metro area, and one in Arlington, Tex. RealEstate.com. This site's claim to fame is the mortgage auction. You post a free application online; RealEstate.com pulls your credit report and posts the information online for lenders to bid for your business. You remain anonymous to the lenders. Real-estate.com then chooses the best bid, based on the lowest annual percentage rate, and passes the offer on to you within 24 hours. It's up to you whether to proceed with that lender. The Web site works with more than 200 lenders, including other good lending sites such as iOwn.com and Eloan.com. The site will become more useful in the near future if, as expected, it incorporates information from one of the large listing sites and allows users to see copies of their important documents online, including the appraisal report, title search and the HUD-1 closing statement, which details every little (and not-so-little) cost associated with a deal. The site offers historic and expected appreciation rates for homes within a one- to two-mile radius of an address, which may not be specific enough to be really useful. And good luck interpreting the demographic data provided for a neighborhood. How does the fact that 93% of a neighborhood's residents drive a car, truck or van to work affect your decision to buy there? HomeGain.com. Word-of-mouth remains the best way to find a good real estate agent. But that's little help if you don't know a soul where you're moving. The Agent Evaluator service on HomeGain.com could help. You register by answering questions about your plans to buy or sell, and about the size, age and price of the house you're interested in. The answers are posted online--without your name or contact information--and agents who have registered with HomeGain.com can make a proposal to work with you as a buyer's or seller's agent. They can't contact you directly unless you contact them first. At a minimum, the process is likely to link you to agents who are comfortable working online. Eloan.com. This site doesn't try to do it all--it just makes loans. But it offers a wide variety of them--mortgages, home-equity loans, auto loans, and even credit cards--and helps you figure out which one is best. Gomez Advisors, an e-commerce research company, ranked it the top lending site last fall, citing competitive rates and ease of use (IOwn ran a close second). The site offers a nice comparison service that allows you to figure out the pros and cons of points versus no points, and fixed versus adjustable rates.
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