Better.com Founder & CEO Vishal Garg joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel to address the longterm impact the coronavirus left on the housing industry.

Video Transcript

- Whether you rent or own, everybody has to have a roof over their head. And one of the companies that is at the forefront of digital financing, say, for your mortgage is Better.com. The founder and CEO, Vishal Garg, joins us right now with some really remarkable data from the month of April, when you consider most of the world, at least in the United States, is shut down. And you would think things had dried up. But as you shared with us, April was really stellar for you. [INAUDIBLE] 36% increase in purchase applications in April. What's that about?

VISHAL GARG: We can't figure it out, but we think that there's still-- the American dream is still very much intact. People are-- I've seen articles where people are saying they, instead of spending money on experiences, which a lot of millennials have been doing for the past 10, 15 years, people now want to spend money on their home. And a lot of millennials are going back to the suburbs or sheltering in the suburbs, and they're saying, hey, actually we want to buy a place, and we want to live life like this, with a white picket fence and so on and so forth.

So we're actually starting to see a massive, massive outpouring of what I think has been a long-term trend as the millennial age population enters into prime home buying demographic-- age demographics, like the 35 to 45-year-old age demographic, where they are starting to settle. And while the coronavirus and all of the things associated with it are super terrible for the real estate industry, the real estate industry has been adapting, and has been adapting really interestingly. FaceTime video showings. Almost a lot of things that people had wanted but the real estate industry was resistant to are now happening because of the recent events with the coronavirus. And I think that that is where supply and demand are meeting together.

- Vishal, the mortgage application index from the Mortgage Bankers Association, I believe in the last week or so of April was down 20% year over year. So obviously, what you're experiencing at Better.com is quite different from the overall market if you look at those numbers. I mean, how many applications are you talking about when you're talking about that increase that you were seeing? And I mean, that's a real divergence in [INAUDIBLE].

VISHAL GARG: To give you some context, we funded $1.4 billion of loans in April, and I think we saw something north of $20 billion of applications. And so we're talking about seriously significant numbers. Now, what differentiates better from most others is we're almost like the Instacart or Amazon of mortgage, where you can do the entire process entirely online, digitally. Go online, get a preapproval letter, get matched with a realtor instantly in the neighborhood and with the same type of philosophy as you're looking for, process and bid on houses, and then be able to actually even close with a notary coming to you or online. And so I think our ability to do this entirely online is what's separating us from the rest of the industry.

- Are you hearing any feedback from realtors, because you're on the financing side of this, whether people are willing to make a purchase without actually going to see the property, since they can now do these visual tours?

VISHAL GARG: I think people are purchasing properties that they might have already seen a while ago. So like the dream house that you wanted to buy last year but suddenly, you know, the kids had to go back to school and you kept on renting, and now that dream house is up for sale again. So I see a lot of transactions where people have already been familiar with the property, where last year they might have gotten a preapproval for the property. I'm not seeing as many transactions in places where people are seeing properties entirely online and then saying, hey, I want to hit the Buy It Now button.

We think that's coming in the future, and we're seeing some of that in new housing. Like so new built housing homebuilders, where someone had already seen the lot, and obviously you're going to buy a place and the homebuilder is going to build it for you. So we're seeing some of that, but we're not seeing old houses that people have never seen, you know, fly off the shelves. We haven't gotten to like Carvana or Auto Nation of housing yet.

- And one of the things we are seeing is that actual prices are actually going up despite COVID-19 because there's a shortage of housing for sale. Vishal Garg, thank you so much for joining us. Better.com founder and CEO. I want to invite you back at some point to take a look at the mortgage market.