LendingTree Suit Claims Google Is Getting Into Mortgages

August 27, 2009 at 1:45 am PT

A suit filed on Tuesday by online mortgage company LendingTree relies on a provocative premise: Google (GOOG) is getting into the loan aggregation business.

The suit, filed in a Charlotte federal court, is against a company called Mortech, which provides a technology that LendingTree uses to automate lender offer pricing. LendingTree says it has an exclusive contract with Mortech, but it recently discovered that the company was also working with Google–which LendingTree claims plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September.

Google declined to comment on the suit. As for its plans in the mortgage business, a spokesman said, “we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”

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Tagged with: ad unit, advertising, Charlotte, Digits, frontpage, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Google, innovation, LendingTree, loan aggregation, Mortech, mortgage, software, The Wall Street Journal

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