This policy describes how EquityBankLoan researches, sources, reviews and corrects what it publishes. It describes what the site actually does today, not what it aspires to.
Editorial independence
Decisions about what to publish, and how to describe a product, are made on editorial grounds by Michael Yanda. No lender or other outside party reviews, approves or has any input into our content before publication.
EquityBankLoan currently has no advertising, no affiliate links and no commercial relationship with any lender. If that changes, it will be disclosed on how we make money, and it will not change how we report facts. A commercial relationship will never determine whether a lender appears here, what we say about its terms, or the order in which anything is listed.
Sourcing standards
Primary sources are preferred, and for lender facts they are required. A lender requirement is recorded only when the lender itself substantiates it, in its own product pages, disclosures, rate pages, official FAQs or eligibility documentation.
Third-party publishers may be used to discover that a product exists or to find where a lender documents it. A third-party publisher never becomes the evidence for a lender requirement. If another site reports that a lender requires a particular credit score and the lender does not say so, we record it as not published.
For general educational material we prefer authoritative public sources, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we cite them.
Unknown is a real answer
Where a lender does not publish something, the site says it is not published. We do not substitute a typical figure, an industry average, or a number borrowed from a comparable lender.
This produces visible gaps, and the gaps are the point. A lender choosing not to publish its maximum CLTV is information about that lender. Filling it with a plausible guess would hide that and would put a number in front of you that nobody can stand behind.
Published, interpreted, and not published
Every material figure carries one of three states, and the site shows which:
- Published means the lender states it directly. It appears as a plain figure.
- Interpreted means we worked it out from something the lender said rather than copying a stated number. It appears labelled as our reading, not as the lender’s figure.
- Not published means we looked and the lender does not state it.
An example of interpretation: a lender that says you need “at least 15% equity” has not stated a maximum combined loan-to-value of 85%, but the arithmetic follows. We show the figure and label it as ours.
Verification dates and freshness
Every lender fact records the page it was read from and the date it was read, and both are shown to you.
Two kinds of fact age differently. Rates and promotional offers change on a market timescale, so a rate must have been checked within the last 30 days to be presented as current information; past that, it is shown as a dated observation or not at all. Product and underwriting characteristics such as maximum CLTV, credit requirements, fee schedules, draw and repayment periods and eligibility change slowly and deliberately, so age does not withdraw them. Instead they are flagged internally for re-checking.
Nothing is deleted or downgraded to unknown simply because time passed. An old reading remains a sourced, dated record of what the lender published on that date, which is a smaller claim than saying it is current, and we keep the two apart.
AI-assisted research
Research on this site is AI-assisted. Our research agent, Chris, locates lender documentation, extracts published terms, structures them, and flags gaps and inconsistencies. Chris is software, and we identify it as such wherever its work appears.
AI research is not verification. It is preparation for verification. The process is: primary sources, then AI-assisted research, then structured evidence, then editorial review, then publication.
The known weaknesses of automated research, including misreading hedged wording and missing terms buried in fine print, are set out on Chris’s page rather than glossed over.
Human editorial review
A human reviewer checks the evidence behind a record and marks that version reviewed. The site then displays a reviewed-by line with the reviewer and the date. Reviewing means checking that what we publish is reasonably supported by the sources it cites and accurately presented, based on what those sources said at the time. It is not a certification that every figure is correct, and it is not independent confirmation with the lender. Our site disclaimer explains the limits.
That line is a factual claim about the specific version you are reading, and the software enforces it. When a version is marked reviewed, the site records a fingerprint of every published fact, source, condition and piece of evidence in it. If any of that changes afterwards, the reviewed-by line is withdrawn automatically and the item returns to the review queue. Attribution is generated from those records, never typed into a page.
Where you see research attributed to Chris with editorial oversight but no reviewed-by line, that version has not been through human review yet.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will check it against the source.
Where a material figure was wrong, we correct it and the correction resets that record’s review state, so the change has to be checked by a human before the site says it was reviewed. Verification dates are updated when a record is re-checked, so you can always see when the information was last confirmed.
We do not currently operate a separate public corrections log. If corrections become frequent enough to warrant one, we will add it.
Lender inclusion is not endorsement
A lender appearing on this site is not a recommendation, an endorsement, or a statement that it is a good choice for you. The lenders recorded so far were chosen because their documentation was detailed enough to test our research method and because their products are structured differently from each other.
Ordering carries no meaning and is not a ranking. A lender being absent means only that we have not researched it yet.
What we do not do
- We do not rate lenders out of five, or award badges.
- We do not describe anything as the best, easiest or fastest.
- We do not accept payment for coverage, placement or favorable description.
- We do not present a calculator result as an offer, an approval or a preapproval.
- We do not give personal financial advice.