A statutory five-year clock
Funds must be used for a home purchase within five consecutive years of account approval, or the account closes and the tax benefit unwinds. Every accountholder has a deadline on file.
Sponsorship & advertising
Every visitor is a dated mortgage lead.
This is the independent comparison guide for Ohio Homebuyer Plus. The people who use it are not browsing — they are Ohio residents choosing where to open a down-payment savings account, and the program gives them a hard five-year deadline to buy a home. You are reaching a deposit customer today and a mortgage applicant on a known clock.
Independent guide, not affiliated with the State of Ohio or any listed institution. See the consumer site.
Why this audience converts differently
Most financial comparison traffic is undated and uncommitted. Ohio Homebuyer Plus traffic is neither, because the program's own rules do the qualifying for you.
Self-selected intent
Opening the account requires attesting, under penalty of perjury, that the money is for an Ohio home purchase. This is not an aspiration — it is a signed commitment.
Two products, one customer
The saver opens a deposit account now and needs a mortgage inside five years. Institutions offering closing-cost credits are already using the account as a mortgage funnel.
Residency is pre-filtered
Eligibility requires Ohio residency and an Ohio primary residence. There is no out-of-state waste in this audience.
Balances are real money
Accounts run from a $500 minimum to a $100,000 cap. These are funded relationships, not promotional openings that never get used.
The spread is already funded
The Treasurer places a linked deposit at below-market rate, so the enhanced APY is funded from that spread. Participation economics are set by the program, not by your margin.
The visibility gap
The strongest argument for sponsoring this page is not our traffic — it is your competitors' silence. A saver comparing options can only evaluate institutions that actually publish something.
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participating institutions publish no rate at all online. A saver cannot compare them, so they compete on branch proximity alone.
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separates the highest and lowest published headline APY. Dispersion this wide is exactly why shoppers use a comparison tool.
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institutions have stopped accepting new applications, concentrating demand on those still open.
What sponsorship does not buy. Rankings are computed from published rates and the saver's own inputs. A sponsor cannot buy a higher position, a better rate display, or the removal of a competitor. Selling that would destroy the comparison's value to the people who use it — which is the only reason it is worth sponsoring.
Audience & performance
—Monthly unique visitors
—Monthly comparison sessions
—Outbound clicks to institutions
—Median session duration
—% of traffic from Ohio
—Cost per outbound click
These figures are not yet published. This page ships with the audience numbers blank on purpose. Until the site has a measurement history worth quoting, the honest pitch is the market structure above and a pilot offer below — not a projection dressed up as a metric.
What we can report to a sponsor
- Outbound clicks to your listing, monthly, from analytics event tracking.
- Impressions of your row and how often it appeared inside an applied filter.
- Which balance tiers savers modelled before clicking through to you.
- Geographic concentration of the ZIP searches that surfaced your branches.
We do not collect personal information from savers, do not build profiles, and cannot deliver contact details for individual visitors. Attribution stops at the click.
Sponsorship packages
All packages are flat-fee advertising for a fixed term. Pricing is deliberately left open below — set it once you have traffic data to justify a number.
Verified Listing
Price to be set
No cost — offered to every participant.
- Your published rate, tiers and incentives kept current
- Direct link to your program page
- Branch locations on the distance filter
- Corrections honoured within one business day
Sponsor
Price to be set
Quarterly or annual term.
- Everything in Verified Listing
- Clearly labelled sponsor badge on your row
- Logo placement in the comparison header
- An expanded profile: products, contacts, first-time-buyer programs
- Monthly performance report — impressions and outbound clicks
Category Partner
Price to be set
Annual, limited availability.
- Everything in Sponsor
- Placement on the education sections, not just the comparison
- Co-branded explainer content on saving for a down payment
- Named in outreach to savers who ask for guidance
- Quarterly review of the data we hold on your institution
Suggested pilot. Cautious buyers rarely sign an annual contract with a new publisher. A single-quarter trial at a nominal rate, with a performance report at the end and no renewal obligation, converts far better than a rate card — and gives you the case study needed to price the next one.
Who at your institution should see this
Homebuyer Plus sits across deposits and mortgage, which is why it often has no clear owner. These are the roles that typically hold the budget and the mandate.
Most likely to say yes
- Chief Marketing Officer or Director of Marketing — owns acquisition spend and brand placement.
- Head of Retail Deposits or Deposit Product Manager — measured on account growth and cost of funds.
- Mortgage Sales Manager — sees a pipeline of dated, pre-qualified purchase intent.
- Digital Marketing Manager — already buying search terms this audience uses.
Who must sign off
- Compliance / BSA officer — reviews any third-party advertising for UDAAP and advertising-rule exposure.
- Vendor management — many institutions treat a marketing publisher as a third-party relationship requiring review.
- Legal — for RESPA questions where mortgage is involved.
Expect a longer cycle than a normal ad buy. Leading with the compliance section below, unprompted, removes the most common reason these deals stall.
How we stay clean
Regulated buyers need to know what they are attaching their name to. This is the posture, in plain terms.
What we do
- Label every sponsorship visibly and adjacent to the placement, never buried in a footer.
- Keep rankings independent of who pays — order comes from published rates and the saver's inputs.
- List every participating institution, sponsor or not, including those we hold no rate for.
- Cite the source and effective date of every rate, and flag stale or self-contradictory disclosures.
- Charge flat fees for a fixed term, invoiced regardless of outcome.
- Correct errors quickly and note when a figure was last verified.
What we will not do
- Take per-lead or per-closed-loan payment for mortgage business — RESPA Section 8 territory.
- Sell placement in the rankings, or removal of a competitor.
- Quote a rate you have not published, or leave a corrected rate up.
- Sell, broker or transfer visitor personal information.
- Describe the site as endorsed by the Treasurer's office or the State of Ohio.
- Publish audience figures we have not measured.
Not legal advice. RESPA, UDAAP and state advertising rules apply to this arrangement and both sides should have counsel review any agreement. The distinction that matters most: flat-fee advertising for a fixed term is treated very differently from compensation tied to referrals of settlement service business.
Questions institutions ask
Can we pay to rank higher?
No. Order is computed from published rates and whatever balance or location the saver enters. Sponsorship buys labelled visibility — a badge, logo placement and an expanded profile — not position. If ranking were purchasable the comparison would be worthless to savers, and the audience you are buying would disappear.
We are already listed. Why pay for anything?
You do not have to. Listing is free and stays free. Sponsorship exists for institutions that want to be more than a row — an expanded profile, logo visibility, and a monthly report on how many savers actually clicked through to you.
How do you handle our rate changing?
Send it and we update, typically within a business day. We also re-check published pages periodically. Every row carries the effective date the institution itself disclosed, and where a page contradicts itself we say so rather than picking the flattering number.
Is this a lead generation service?
No, and that distinction is deliberate. We do not collect saver contact details or sell leads. Sponsors receive aggregate performance data — impressions and outbound clicks — not personal information. Attribution stops at the click.
What are your audience numbers?
Ask, and you will get whatever measurement history exists at that point, unembellished. This page deliberately ships with the audience figures blank rather than filled with projections. If a publisher quotes you a number they cannot source in analytics, that tells you something.
Are you affiliated with the Treasurer's office?
No. This is an independent guide compiled from the Treasurer's published materials and each institution's own disclosures. We state that on every page and will never imply state endorsement of a sponsor.
Our compliance team will want documentation.
Expected. We can supply a plain-language description of the placement, screenshots of exactly how a sponsor is labelled, our data sources and update cadence, and a flat-fee insertion order with no referral-based compensation. Most questions are answered before they are asked in the compliance section above.
Start a conversation
The most useful first step is a fifteen-minute call covering what your institution is measured on this year, and whether Homebuyer Plus is owned by deposits, mortgage or marketing. Package fit follows from that.
Steven Chaney · steven@homebuyerPlusOhio.com
Useful to have ready
- Your current Homebuyer Plus APY, tier schedule and effective date
- Any closing-cost credit or opening bonus, and its qualifying conditions
- Whether you are still accepting new applications
- The internal owner of the program — deposits, mortgage or marketing