Citi looks to grow market share with mortgage.com platform

On Wednesdy Citi launched mortgage.com, a new platform that creates a brand-endorsed, consumer-focused channel to leverage Citi’s brand authority and encourage mortgage or refinance applications for the bank.

The company has an aggressive marketing goal to reach the No. 1 spot in organic home-buying search within six months, which is why Citi used its partnership with Razorfish, a Publicis Group company, to amplify its search engine optimization efforts, scalability and reachability. “I think we’re at the perfect point in time, because we were watching Google evolve, and search engines evolve, and different AI engines evolving,” said Sean Stahlman, SVP of SEO at Razorfish. 

“We had to come up with a way to drive applications, and so we tailored the strategy going after about 1,000 keywords with, I think, a monthly search demand of 24 million searches,” Stahlman said. “We then [identified] the place that Citi can play in. And then looking at the vast demand or the vast breadth of competitors out there, we kind of looked at where they are doing well and where did we need to kind of jump in there and kind of close that gap.” 

Citi’s previous use of the URL was to redirect to learning center content within the home lending pages on the Citi domain, according to Head of Mortgage Marketing at Citi, Chip Burgard. The company owned the domain for several years but didn’t have a direct purpose with it until Q4 2023.  

Enter mortgage.com, which Burgard says is a learning platform to grow the bank’s presence in the mortgage space. “We consistently rank as one of the highest-ranking overall lenders with JD Power, year in and year out as one of the most trusted lenders, and we wanted to really kind of lean into that as part of our brand, to become a trusted resource for education around the home-buying and home lending experience,” he said. 

The site, which was constructed throughout nearly all of 2024, launched post-live quality assurance (QA) and has been up for about a day, Burgard confirmed in an interview with HousingWire. Citi led creative testing throughout the year-long site design and build, and will conduct testing throughout 2025.

Per a rep from Citi, the platform is a way for them to “[carve] a space for ourselves through the content and professional advice available on mortgage.com, an area in which Citi has decades of experience through direct-to-consumer and retail branch sales.”

Stahlman said that the platform will feature tools like real-time rate comparisons and digital content to guide borrowers and homeowners through the home-buying and home-owning processes. “There are some calculators that they can leverage about how to access the equity in their home, information on home equity lines of credit, those sorts of things that we’re starting with,” Stahlman added. 

Market share and brand authority 

Why launch this site now? Burgard says mortgage.com is an initiative that Citi should have launched ages ago. “It’s past time for us to take advantage of this opportunity…the market might be down a little bit now, but having home-lending products is a key product that we want to have available to our overall franchise customers….we’re leaning into the home purchase space right now,” he said. “We’ve got good purchase products. We’ve got good special-purpose credit programs for buyers who are in lower-income areas or diverse markets. So there’s a lot of good purchase opportunities right now, and this will also allow us to be prepared and be ranked highly as a resource.” 

Burgard also said that the team of about 50 people behind revamping mortgage.com — made up of SEO experts, content strategists, copywriters, and technical architects — identified an opportunity to take market share from competitors by producing high-quality content, which includes original digital content. To accomplish this, the team conducted extensive research to understand Citi’s competition and identify gaps in their strategies that mortgage.com could fill.

Stahlman said that Citi’s content strategy was created by evaluating the competition and identifying pain points that the average consumer was facing. “The baseline was if BankRate, NerdWallet, Zillow or Redfin have all these things, do we need them? What’s it going to take to get those, and what’s the value of having those? Where do they excel and where do they lack?” he said. 

Burgard says that overall, the platform’s launch is a way for Citi to step further into serving the mortgage space. “We’re not one of the top originators. We’re looking to grow in a prudent manner so that we can make sure that we’re maintaining service levels for our customers and offering the right products that are best for them. We think this is a really strong, low-cost growth opportunity for us that will also help us expand our reach outside of our retail banking branch footprint,” he said.