Online mortgage origination never became the home loan assembly line experts once forecast, but mortgage services that are available on the Internet have been a boon to savvy consumers.

If the optimistic predictions during the dot com boom era of the 1990s had come true, many more consumers today would be signing for mortgages on the electronic dotted line. Instead most consumers still complete mortgages the old fashioned way, seated at a conference table at the close of escrow.

What has changed is mortgage consumers ability to drive a hard bargain.

"The majority of consumers use the Internet to shop for mortgages like they shop for real estate," said Warren Myer, CEO of San Jose, CA-based Myers Internet Services, a Web services developer and consultant for mortgage brokers and loan originators.

"However, complex, infrequent purchases are not well suited to a pure online process. These decisions are best made through a combination of online and offline processes. For complex decisions, human communication, whether it be face it face or via telephone, is much better than e-mail communication," said Myer.

"In addition, the mortgage industry is regulated -- and consumers need to sign an increasing number of complex legal documents," he added.

Even something as simple as completing an application can get tricky online.

One-in-20 online refinance applications failed due to some online glitch, according to Empirix, a Waltham, MA-based electronic applications tester that studied 15 mortgage companies' online refinance applications.

Silver Spring, MD-based mortgage industry consultant MORTECH, LLC surveyed 360 lenders and found 64 percent of them unaware of the software necessary for online mortgages, only six percent actually used such software and only one percent had implemented electronic signatures which are essential for a complete online mortgage process.

"The industry is at the middle point of building its electronic infrastructure," says Jeff Lebowitz, president of MORTECH, LLC.

At that middle point, however, mortgage consumers have gained a bounty of knowledge -- editorial content about mortgages, mortgage calculators, loan comparison assistance, and other tools that help smooth the decision-making process.

"Consumers who go online will find a plethora of useful information. It is definitely a good idea to go online and do independent research. Informed consumers make better decisions. Our research shows that consumers prefer aggregator sites rather than single-lender websites. That's because aggregator sites let consumers shop and compare rates and programs from multiple lenders and brokers easily," Myer said.

Myer and others say shopping around for a home loan has never been easier, but it still comes with caveats. On or off line, the fundamentals of studied consumerism applies.

Here's what they advise: