Industry Briefs Aug. 30, 2021: Home Lending Pal Raises $2M
Home Lending Pal Raises $2.2M in Pre-Series A Round
The Mortgage Collaborative, San Diego, announced the TMC Emerging Technology Fund LP led a pre-Series A investment round in Home Lending Pal, a technology-enabled marketplace that focuses on fair lending practices by using artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technology to turn a complex home research and origination process into an online shopping experience for both qualified and unqualified borrowers.
Home Lending Pal’s platform assists consumers, particularly minorities and millennials, to assess their financial ability to take on a mortgage. It also guides them to take actions to improve their access to mortgage financing and select mortgage originators with whom they want to share their application information based on an AI algorithm that predicts probability to close.
Home Lending Pal has raised $3.5 million to date for its digital mortgage advising platform, powered by artificial intelligence and blockchain.
STRATMOR: Lenders Should Shift Focus to Purchase Business Now
In its latest Insights Report, mortgage advisory firm STRATMOR Group, Greenwood Village, Colo., connects the dots between lender profitability and business mix and details how the coming purchase market will impact lenders that are not prepared.
In “Prepare Now for the Storms Ahead: Build Your Purchase Business” Garth Graham, STRATMOR senior partner, discusses data that makes clear the causal link between high refinance volume and high profitability. He highlights industry data from the Mortgage Bankers Association that clearly links refinance business volatility to shifting profit margins for lenders.
“The purchase market is predictable, with year-over-year adjustments that do not break the business plans of purchase-centric lenders,” Graham said. “The challenge is that when the refinance business skyrockets (or falls back to earth), it upsets the entire origination market.”
The issue can be accessed at https://www.stratmorgroup.com/insights-report/.
CoreLogic Integrates with ICE Mortgage Technology Platform
CoreLogic, Irvine, Calif., entered into an enterprise agreement with ICE Mortgage Technology, Pleasanton, Calif., to support the company’s commitment to delivering a digital mortgage offering for mortgage lenders and their borrowers.
CoreLogic will leverage Encompass Partner Connect across 10 fundamental CoreLogic solutions to update critical data-driven processes and make these solutions available to thousands of mutual clients on the ICE Mortgage Technology Platform. Through the collaboration, ICE will provide its customers the ability to automate the ordering of CoreLogic services, natively through the workflow automation within Encompass. In addition, ICE will expose APIs for these services, so lenders can deploy service ordering throughout any of the ICE platforms.
Redfin: Median Home Price Up 16% From 2020
Redfin, Seattle, said the national median home sale price increased 16% year over year to $361,225. At the same time, the share of home sellers dropping their asking prices each week continues to increase.
The report said pending sales are declining seasonally but are still up 10% from a year ago. “Overall, homebuying demand is still very strong,” said Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather. “The market frenzy of 2021 has cooled somewhat, but home sellers are still very much in the driver’s seat in the housing market today. Demand for homes is making a comeback because even though home prices are high and competition is still steep, homebuyers don’t have many alternatives but to keep trying. This continued demand for homes is enticing more homeowners to sell in order to avoid the fear of missing out on historically high prices. This enthusiasm from both buyers and sellers is translating into continued growth in pending sales compared to last year.”
Through the four-week period ending Aug. 22, Redfin said new listings of homes for sale were nearly flat (+1%) from a year earlier. The number of homes being listed is in a typical seasonal decline, down 9% from the 2021 peak during the four-week period ending June 27.
Nomis Solutions Enhances Margin Setter Dashboard
Nomis Solutions, San Francisco, introduced several product enhancements to its mortgage technology platform, further enhancing the market intelligence and actionable pricing capabilities available to its mortgage lending clients.
Updated data frequency and enhanced coverage further expand users’ view into the granular pricing intel needed to compete more effectively in local markets, and brand-new Margin Setter functionality enables users to better maintain a strategic and competitive market position, despite a constantly shifting landscape. The newly released, intuitive Margin Setter dashboard enables mortgage lenders to maintain market position month-over-month.
Sales Boomerang Upcoming Webinars on Aug. 31, Sept. 2
Sales Boomerang will hold two upcoming webinars, on Aug. 31 and Sept. 2.
Loyalty is Earned: Becoming The “Always” Lender (Aug. 31, 1:00 p.m. ET) features Ernie Graham, CEO of Homebot, and Alex Kutsishin, CEO of Sales Boomerang, as they share the retention strategies that ensure borrowers think of you for their next loan. The registration link is https://hubs.ly/H0VYJvz0.
How To [Legally] Start Winning with An Unfair Advantage takes place Sept. 2 at 3:0o p.m. ET, featuring Kutsishin and Jim Deitch, moderated by Pablo Troncoso, to discuss tech tools and strategies to field and execute with an all-star production team. Registration link is https://hubs.ly/H0VYNwq0.
ChainLogix Announces TaxLogix Platform for Automated Property Tax Search
ChainLogix Mortgage Solutions, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., released its new platform TaxLogix. By leveraging advanced RPA and Technology, TaxLogix automates property tax research.
TaxLogix features include ease of ordering, the ability to manage a user profile as well as bulk uploads. The system also provides automatic report generation and delivery as well as dashboard analytics.
Planet Home Lending Opens New Albany, Ind. Office
Planet Home Lending LLC, Meriden, Conn., opened a new branch in New Albany, Ind., offering home loans for military service members, first-time homebuyers, move-up buyers and people who want to purchase and renovate homes. The branch is located at 821 Mt. Taber Rd. Suite 210, New Albany.
Retail Branch Manager Stephen Day will lead the branch. He has more than three decades of mortgage industry experience.
Black Knight: Forbearance Plans Edge Up 2nd Straight Week
Black Knight, Jacksonville, Fla., released its weekly McDash Flash forbearance tracker, showing as of Aug. 24, 1.76 million borrowers remain in COVID-19 related forbearance plans, including 1.9% of GSE, 5.8% of FHA/VA and 4.1% of portfolio held and privately securitized mortgages.
The report said the overall number of active forbearances rose by 12,000 since last Tuesday, driven primarily by a 10,000 increase in plans among portfolio/PLS loans. FHA/VA volumes rose a more modest 3,000 – with GSE plans (-1,000) seeing the week’s only decline. This puts plan volumes down 132,000 (-7%) from the same time last month.
