According to a lawsuit by LendinTree

Aug 27, 2009 08:24 GMT  ·  By

No matter what Google seems to be doing lately it's bound to set off some people. Whether it’s local real estate agents in Australia or the biggest online book retailer in the world, people take notice when the search giant encroaches on their turf. On the other hand, Google does seem to want a piece of every possible market and now, courtesy of a lawsuit filed by LendingTree, it looks like it is getting into the loan aggregation business.

LendingTree is a company that helps people find mortgages and loans online using some technology from Mortech. The lawsuit, filed in a North Carolina federal court, doesn't involve Google but rather Mortech, which LendingTree is accusing of breach of contract as it claims that the former, with which it says it has an exclusive deal, will start offering the same technology to Google, which is apparently going to launch a service competing with LendinTree's offerings.

“LendingTree recently learned that Google imminently plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September of this year that would compete with LendingTree,” the complaint, which the NYTimes managed to get a hold of, reads. “Lending Tree has also learned that Mortech intends to make its pricing engine services available for use with Google’s new service and will send information related to mortgage loan offers to be displayed to consumers on Google’s Web site.”

The company also claims it has secured screenshots of the current development version of the upcoming Google service indicating that the two products will be very similar, providing “customers with conditional loan offers in addition to lenders’ contact information.” LendingTree hasn't made any comments about the lawsuit when asked by several parties. The most interesting part though is Google's response. While it didn't make any comment on the lawsuit either and refused to give any indication of any planned or upcoming products, the search giant did say that it did indeed plan to run some ads next to mortgage-related searches in the US but only in a small-scale test.