In the Amazon age, consumers are more pampered – and less patient – than ever. Tap your phone and, voilà – hot food from your favorite restaurant arrives in minutes. High-end electronics appear on your doorstep in hours.
However, the mortgage industry has yet to deliver anything like that level of instant gratification. The typical time from application to consummation of a mortgage is 50 days, according to ICE Mortgage Technology, a glacial pace compared to the swiftness of most other things in modern life.
“The mortgage space is many decades behind everyone else,” says Chris Boyle, a longtime executive at mortgage giant Freddie Mac and now president of home lending at Roostify.
Boyle’s company is one of many aiming to hasten the mortgage process so that closing times might someday be measured in days rather than weeks. Roostify is part of a new breed of property technology, or “proptech,” companies that aim to pull home loans and property sales into the digital age.
Here are trends to watch in 2022.
1. Mortgages: Getting to yes faster
Digital players want to close your mortgage more swiftly – although even the optimists say the process will continue to unspool over a period of days and weeks, rather than the seconds and minutes used as benchmarks in other corners of the economy.
One obvious obstacle, according to Jess Kennedy, co-founder of Beeline: Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who set the rules for most mortgages, have built-in seven day minimums for many of their processes.
While proptech companies acknowledge they won’t be able to wire the money within hours of your mortgage application, they’re focusing on a different goal – giving consumers a yes or no instantly.
Beeline, a lender that does business in two dozen states, promises to let borrowers know exactly where they are in the process at any moment. “We liken it to the Domino’s Pizza Tracker,” Kennedy says.
Roostify, which works to speed the mortgage process on behalf of lenders, has a similar approach. “You want to give the consumer certainty,” Boyle says.
Roostify focuses on time savings by automating paper-intensive parts of the process, like verifying tax returns and pay stubs. Having an actual human look at every document adds days and weeks to the timetable, Boyle says.
But automation takes lenders only so far. The complexity of mortgage applications poses challenges for lenders that hope to fully automate their approvals.
Every application is unique, and loan applications from self-employed borrowers and real estate investors can stump even veteran loan officers. In other words, programming a robot to shepherd a $300,000 loan through approval ain’t easy.
“Every single …….
Source: https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/tech-trends-for-2022/
