Green Real Estate SD

Real estate website Zillow.com on Tuesday joined the saturated mortgage app market with one of its own.

The tool, available to only iPhoneusers, lets you calculate:

-Your estimated mortgage paymenton a potential purchase.

-How much home you can afford.

-What you would roughly pay if you refinanced.

When you launch the app, you’ll see a chart showing the performance of the 30-year fixed rate, which fell last week to its lowest level this year.

Below you’ll see three calculators, and within each one, you can manipulate a number a features to get an estimate of how much you’d owe in a home loan.

Likes: What sets the Zillow app apart from other mortgage apps is its simple design interface and the attention to detail within the calculators, which is important when deciding on a big payment such as a mortgage.

It’s nice that you can immediately visualize your mortgage payment in a pie chart as you manipulate price, the down payment and interest rate. You can see similar visuals in the affordability and refinancing calculators within the app.

Dislikes: The slide bars that let you decrease and increase the field amounts are finicky. But I realized you can just tap the fields and input figures using the number pad. It would be helpful if the app developers made that option more visible.

Zillow also should consider making an Android version. The Guardian, a publication in the U.K., reported last year that Google was activating 160,000 mobile phones that the Android operating system daily. Read that story here.

See a preview of how it works, and try it yourself by searching “Zillow Mortgage Marketplace” in the App store.