Empowering homebuyers with smart, interactive tools
Kyle Seagraves is a certified mortgage advisor, licensed loan originator, and the owner of Win the House You Love, an educational home buying service for people in the U.S. A former loan officer, Kyle has spent years helping homebuyers navigate the intimidating world of home financing, and believes deeply that everyday people need access to all the information before making life-changing financial commitments.
Envisioning empowerment
Kyle turned to Calculator Studio after seeing how difficult it was for his clients to compare loans from different lenders and confidently assess mortgage quotes. According to Kyle, home buying is a daunting task for potential buyers, due in part to a lack of available in-depth, unbiased information.
Without access to the pricy software used by industry professionals to compare offers and explore the implications of a loan over time, buyers struggle to evaluate their options. “One lender might give them a 3% rate, another 3.5%, and yet another gives them 4%. They all have different costs, the mortgage insurance is different, and there’s no good way for [homebuyers] to compare those loans side by side” Kyle explains.
Up until this point, homebuyers have had to just say ‘I guess this is the best option,’ which is a really bad way to make a decision on something that could cost tens of thousands of dollars over ten, twenty, or thirty years.
Kyle quickly realized how valuable it would be to make an interactive calculator available to his clients – a user-friendly service to empower homebuyers during one of the most stressful periods in their lives. His question then became: “How do I create a webpage where people can interact with these numbers so I don’t have to code anything?” Without any coding experience, the tool Kyle envisioned seemed out of his reach.
Numbers + no-code = hybrid solutions
Prior to finding Calculator Studio, Kyle sold access to his calculator solution in Google Sheets. “I was looking at some other no-code tools, but everything was oriented around database interactions rather than any sort of formulas or mathematical models” he explains. “There is an endless supply of no-code tools that allow you to have database interactions, but none allowed you to work with complex formulas or financial models.”
“I wanted to create tools that allowed homebuyers to put in the numbers that they wanted and explore them in a new way, without having to do all the math for themselves” he says. Once Kyle discovered Calculator Studio, however, he entered an entirely new world of tool-building for non-coding professionals. “What surprised me the most about Calculator Studio was just how easy it was to take a spreadsheet and give it an interface. That’s what I had been searching for for so long.”
I stumbled upon Calculator Studio after searching endlessly for solutions and then thought oh my gosh, this is something I can actually use really well.
Building people-friendly tools
Now a Calculator Studio power user, Kyle invests time building narrative-based scenarios that walk clients through basic inputs and lead to a beautiful dashboard. In his own words, Calculator Studio helps him build “an incredibly helpful product for people which I otherwise wouldn’t be able to create on my own.” Another big plus? He’s now building the tools he needs in only a few hours.
My goal is to give the power back to home buyers so that they can take ownership of the process and make really good decisions for themselves and their families.
Case in point: this Paying Points Calculator features a thoughtful narrative to guide clients through what might – in another tool – be quite a complex scenario. Kyle’s customers can interact with the data and really understand the story behind how the numbers work together. With hands-on exploration like this, clients can use tools built in Calculator Studio to discover their best loan options, with all the details at their fingertips.
At Win the House You Love, Kyle Seagraves actively counters the lack of data transparency in home finance with affordable, easy-to-use Calculator Studio tools. By illuminating the purchasing process for everyday people, Kyle puts the power where it belongs – in the hands of homebuyers. Find Kyle on his YouTube channel and check out his tutorial below to see Calculator Studio in action!