Has anyone else noticed Ditech.com’s brand repositioning? I was watching TV the other day and I noticed a Ditech.com commercial and it actually looked like they were trying to come off like a respectable mortgage company. If you remember during the refi boom Ditech was all over the TV with their slap stick commercials showing a fat mortgage broker proclaiming that he “lost another one to Ditech” and their $395 closing fee.
Of course, the TV ad was far from the truth. Most good brokers and bankers rarely lost deals to Ditech. Ditech was actually kind of considered Ameriquest-lite in the industry given how they raped their customer with fees and was one of the worst boiler room mortgage hack shops around. The advertisements pretty much showed they weren’t necessarily targeting the sharpest tools in the shed for customers either.
Now Ditech’s new tag line is “People are smart” and they have jazzed up their website to get rid of the sub-prime bargain basement feel. On another note, Fortune Magazine ran a article about GMAC, the parent company of Ditech sending very misleading direct mail pieces trying to scare unsuspecting homeowners into refinancing. A leopard can’t change its spots and if people truly are smart they will stay away from Ditech regardless of the new image.
I had noticed the change in tone from Ditech, but I had not put together the original and follow-up ads with the Fortune article. Last year, clients would tell me about their experience looking at Ditech. This year, clients no longer mention Ditech at all.
Ditech basically rode the refi wave. I am sure like many of these companies they are going through a serious slow down. Most people probably wouldn’t trust them to handle a purchase transaction. However, when rates were falling during the refi boom it was pretty easy to set up a call center full of monkeys to do refis even if rates were higher than market.