Plug into the world of home mortgages, loans, and lenders on the Internet.

When it comes to researching mortgage options, the Internet offers 24-hour convenience. While most customers still prefer to complete their loan transaction with a "live" mortgage broker or lender, there's a lot of valuable information online.

Here, we explore the benefits and alert you to the potential pitfalls of shopping for your mortgage online. Mortgage websites come in two basic flavors: those sites that don't offer loans (called "no-loan" sites) and those that do.

Mortgage Information ("No-Loan") Sites

No-loan sites don't broker or lend mortgage money, but typically provide mortgage content, information, and news, as well as mortgage rates -- just what most mortgage shoppers want and need.

Sites like HSH Homeplans (http://www.hsh.com) and Bank Rate Monitor (http://www.bankrate.com) keep daily tabs on mortgage rates, indexes, and market events that push costs up or down. Visit sites like these to obtain the latest regional average rates on purchase, refinance, equity, and other mortgages.

Also explore these sites' libraries of mortgage information: You can examine mortgage programs, learn mortgage lingo, understand underwriting, get answers about the loan qualification process, crunch numbers with online mortgage calculators, and more.

No-loan sites are also referred to as "referral" sites because they introduce you to a host of participating lenders, either through advertisements or links embedded in the content. The referrals could be useful, provided you gather enough of them to adequately compare loan costs. That's a tedious process -- and advertised rates are often based on a best-case scenario, and can change overnight.

Still within the no-loan site category, don't overlook informative government, quasi-government, and trade sites, including Fannie Mae (http://www.fanniemae.com), Freddie Mac (http://www.freddiemac.com), the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (http://www.hud.gov), and Mortgage Bankers Association of America (http://www.mbaa.org). These offer information about the latest mortgage programs, conforming loan amount changes, and general consumer and industry information.