Alltel Builds Alliance to Put Mortgage Information on the Web.(Brief Article)

In what could give a shot in the arm to the reputation of online mortgage portals, ALLTEL has announced partnering with three leading lenders to launch a new mortgage services portal.

Dubbed Mortgage PhD and scheduled to begin operations by spring of this year, the new initiative will establish an electronic connection via the Internet to facilitate data, information and transaction flows between mortgage industry business partners.

"This initiative is not something we are building for our own client base," ALLTEL marketing vice president Bob Hunter told MSN. "This truly is an industrywide initiative, an open industry marketplace."

The first phase of Mortgage PhD will be aggregating public record property and real estate tax information, he said, responding to industry input that providing such a database would be a significant contribution.

ALLTEL definitely thinks of its new MortgagePhD.com site as a one-stop-shopping site. The name PhD, said ALLTEL vice president Christy Emmanuel, is an acronym for Portal, Hub and Depot: an online marketplace accessed via Web browser, a connection point where partners can do commerce with one another, and a data depot which will access multiple databases shared by the participants.

The MortgagePhD.com website is slated to become operational in the second quarter of this year.

"We are going to provide middleware with a query application capability allowing more than one database to be accessed," she said, citing as an example a user accessing a real-estate parcel database and coupling that with a query about hazard insurance for a particular parcel based on its location.