Just went onto comparis.ch as a result of an email. As it happens it was too late anyway, having just renegotiated my mortgage last month, but I thought I'd spend two minutes to see what they said.
Was surprised at the depth of some of the questions, and that I needed to login to proceed, but went through the motions, only to discover that they wanted to charge me for the service. And not just a little contributio-type charge either, but 148 francs.
Sorry I'll say that again, louder. Comparis.ch tried to charge me 148 francs just to compare mortgage lenders.
Is this now something they're introducing across the board, or is it just for certain products? And will it signal the end of the website if they continue?
As a supplemental question, who in their right mind would pay for this information in advance? I mean, it claimed to be able to save me thousands, but it didn't show what rates it was comparing to, so would I really be stupid enough to pay their exhorbitant fee and only then find out that their base data from my own lender was incorrect?
I'm very surprised, as I thought they were already being paid by touching a percentage if you concluded a contract through them? At least it's the case with health and car insurances.
I'm not sure how new it is but we had the same thing back in may/June when we were looking at mortgages too. IIRC it was something like 160 chf they were asking for. Needless to say we didn't take them up on it and did the research ourselves.
It seems like they are cutting the branch they are sitting on. According to their own rules they are not abiding them:
http://en.comparis.ch/comparis/info/rules.aspx
Mortgages
Many mortgage providers (banking and insurance) are listed in the Mortgage Market. comparis.ch includes any further providers in the interest rate comparison free of charge. Here you can go to the Mortgage Market and mortgage rate comparison.
I saw this the other day as well. I don't expect it'll last long - it won't take some bright spark more than a week or so to set up a competitor site which charges less, or is free and uses ad revenue. The information the calculations are based on is freely available.
They were doing this 2 years ago when we were mortgage shopping, but I don't remember how much they were charging.
Oh ye of little faith
I've used the service twice ( here and here ), and it has saved me a packet. What you get for your money is 6-8 mortgage offers, usually way below the published rates. You then get a PDF dossier, or a physical one for a few francs more which you can use to bargain with. In both cases, UBS matched our cheapest offer.
Put it this way, I saved more than CHF 140 in just one month (based on UBS's first mortgage quote and their revised offer once I had shown them my other quotes). So IMHO, it was money well spent and a huge saving of time.
Give me a moment to check ...... I just need to find a free comparison site that compares comparison sites.
Sure, I'm not suggesting that savings aren't available, but as you state, you actually got your own lender to reduce their rate, which they could have done anyway. You can even go check the rates for any given bank on the website itself, e.g.
https://en.comparis.ch/hypotheken/fi...n-schweiz.aspx As it happens, the rate published there for my own bank (OKB) is .15% higher, for the 6-year fixed term I've chosen, than the rate they actually offered me, and as low as any of the other banks I looked at there, which therefore completely undermines any value that the comparison site gives you.
I disagree, a mortgage offer is personal to your particular circumstances e.g. location of property, value, personal earnings etc.. And so what Comparis does is collate all that information and fire it off into a Mortgage market place where providers can bid for your business based on the information presented. Some will surely come up with preferential rates, over and above what they advertise. Sure UBS lowered their rate (2.7 -> 2.3%), but only when I threatened to walk to Basler Kantonalbank if their didn't.. waving my offer from BKB under their noses.
Just to re-iterate, this is not like price comparison (passive), its an active process which takes a few days and where Comparis will step in at different stages to make sure things go smoothly. And the most important thing is that it saves time, you may be able to achieve comparable results by walking into 10 national banks and having a chat, but some don't have the time to go to Bern, Geneva, Zurich, Solothurn etc.. to do that.