Clear Objectives for Mortgage Executives

Mortgage Executives, as you start to dive into the process of analyzing technologies to include in your businesses and their benefits and costs, be prepared for some objections from your managers. This is very common for an industry that hasn’t changed the way they do business for decades, and have the mindset of ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’. However, setting some clear objectives for your organization can encourage innovative thinking and implementation of technology into your business practices.

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark explains why you’ll receive push back from managers about changing your current business processes, and how to overcome those objections by walking you through how to set clear business objectives. If your objectives are good, Mark will lay out what you can expect from your managers, and the next steps for implementing your technology endeavors. 

Best is the Enemy of Better

For those of you whose businesses are going through the process of looking into a technology vendor to transform your organization, first off, congratulations. You’re on the road to evolving your business and gaining a competitive advantage. As you learn through your tech search about what technology can do for your business, there are many aspects of your business that you need to take into consideration. But what questions should you ask? And what should you expect time-wise, expense-wise and capability-wise?

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark walks you through three steps to strategically choosing technology through analysis of your business model and determining where the greatest potential for improvement is. Mark also explains one of his personal favorite analogies, Best is the Enemy of Better, and describes how it applies directly to you in your tech search. 

I Can't Believe This Technology

Technology is everywhere. It’s revolutionized how we make it through our daily lives. Email available from any device at any time. Wi-Fi available just about everywhere. Global internet access at our fingertips. It’s nearly impossible to go through a day without using technology in our jobs, homes and lives. So why is it that the process of buying a home dates back decades and still includes stacks of hundreds of papers, fax machines and snail mail? This business process has the ability to evolve and can use technology effectively to make it easier and more efficient than ever. 

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark explains how you can harness the power of new technology and apply it to your business to help you succeed. He discusses how Pavaso takes leading-edge technology and makes it user-friendly and easy to implement into your business. Lastly, he explains how to turn your business into a mortgage Millennial magnet.

What is Pavaso?

As technology evolves its way into every major industry, it’s clear that the home-buying experience needs modernization. We’ve talked in previous blogs about how the closing issue specifically needs to be fixed, and incorporating technology into real estate is an efficient and confident way to do that. Still, every step of the process could really benefit from technological tools. And as we talk with businesses interested in Pavaso’s technology, the first question we get is “So what is Pavaso? An LOS? A doc-prep company?” So who better to explain what we do than CEO of Pavaso himself, Mark McElroy.

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark breaks down what the Pavaso platform is and why it’s different from anything else in the industry today. He explains the eClosing concept, how Pavaso incorporates every part of the home buying transaction, and most importantly, what it accomplishes for not just you but your business partners and consumers. See how Pavaso revolutionizes home buying for each different stakeholder, whether you’re a lender, title company, real estate agent, investor or service provider.

Obscure Choosing of Technology

After decades of doing business ‘the old-fashioned way’, new industry rules and technology-driven generations have compelled the majority of businesses to try to incorporate technology into their organizations. We know it's no secret that the mortgage industry lags somewhat behind other industries when it comes to technology. Incorporating technology can give you a competitive edge and certainly help you attract consumers. So how do you determine what type of technology your organization can benefit from and where in your business practices it can help you the most?

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark touches on why technology is a crucial part of business today, and why you should view it as an asset to your organization. As your company shops around for various technology solutions, Mark outlines what to look for, the best ways to choose technology that fits your business, and how much you should pay for it.

How to Deal With Closing

Everyone knows that buying a home sucks. The paperwork sucks. The confusion of the process sucks. The collective experience sucks. The overall issue isn’t the origination, underwriting or pre-closing, it’s the actual closing. Because everyone involved in the real estate transaction is contributes toward or is affected by the closing in some way, it’s safe to say that the industry has a closing process issue. It’s a problem so multifaceted, that no one really knows how to fully fix it, which is why it’s been dealt with the same way for the last 50 years. But what if we told you there was an simple way to get everyone on the same page for closings, to ensure that they happen the same way, every time, and to transform the consumer’s experience from dreadful to exciting?

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark breaks down how to deal with the closing issue. Who should oversee the closing, what stakeholders can do to ensure consistent standardized closings, and if there’s a better way to structure closings. He also discusses how a new solution to closing can offer a world-class experience for the consumer, by offering transparency, education and satisfaction.

Digital Mortgage

Between TRID, the CFPB and Millennial demands, businesses are feeling more pressure than ever to find a solution that delivers technology and ease to both business stakeholders and consumers. As they search for a solution, businesses have begun to see the value of eSigning and eClosing, and many have implemented these processes into their business practices. And with these tools, it’s interesting that as it would seem, all of these businesses claim to offer the first complete digital mortgage. However, they fail to mention that a complete digital mortgage does not extend through the closing. Without including the closing process, no one out there truly has a complete digital mortgage.

   

But it's only a matter of time before someone realizes this issue and looks at how to solve it. So what can you do to ensure that your business is the first one there? How can you expand your digital endeavors to incorporate the entire process, from origination through the closing?

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark explains how to take the technology you have in your business processes today and evolve into the industry’s truly first complete digital mortgage.

eSign is Not Your Savior

As the real estate industry looks past TRID, businesses are exploring ways to comply with the CFPB and give the consumer a better experience. Most are looking toward technology to provide benefits, and some specifically to the ideas of eSigning and eClosing.

As businesses do more research on these topic, many conclude that eSigning and eClosing are the same general solution. This couldn’t be more wrong. Yes eSigning digitalizes the signature, but eSigning is only a small part of an actual eClosing. The entire eClosing process can include everything from negotiating the contract with your realtor to an actual digital closing and then post-closing document storage. However, many businesses still expect to overhaul the consumer’s experience with simply eSigning. These individuals should be aware that in the scheme of the transaction, consumers may not gain the expected value from its implementation.

In this episode of Mark’s Minutes, Mark breaks down the difference between eSigning and eClosing and all the different processes that eClosing incorporates. He walks through the steps to evaluating where business problems lie, and how eSigning and eClosing can help those issues. Lastly, he explains the overarching benefits of implementing each of these solutions into your business, and how they can add value for the consumer, leading to a better experience for everyone in the transaction.

TRID Go-Live

The TILA RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rules have been prompting wild predictions of the effects it would have on the real estate industry, since talks of the new rules first came to light. Analysts, professionals and officials alike all had an idea of what they thought was coming. The industry divided into two groups of TRID predictions. 

One that claims that the new rules would change nothing more than required documents for the same processes, and believe that much of the rule’s hype is overblown in the media. HousingWire & CNBC recently published articles reporting that the TRID speculations were a fluke that mirrored the Y2K panic back in 2000.

The other believes that TRID brings the entire industry to a halt, because it changes everything down to the processes by which we do business. Pavaso CEO, Mark McElroy, was one of those who predicted negative TRID effects for the housing market in a CNBC article back in October. The week after TRID go-live, Mark outlined the effects the industry would begin to see in the video blog below.

From a high level, TRID may look like it hasn’t affected much. However, salient or not, TRID has begun to change the industry by affecting the way all of the business stakeholders interact with each other. Before TRID, everyone seemed to stay in their own playground, do their share of the transaction, and move on to the next one. This resulted in stakeholder confusion, overlooked details, and consumers were left out in the cold with a negative experience. TRID requires compliance from all ends of the transaction and calls for each stakeholder to do more to focus on the consumer. Delivering such an experience without partner collaboration would be difficult, so many are evolving their workflows and changing their processes to connect more with each stakeholder. For an industry that rarely collaborates, this is indeed a major change.

Although today, TRID may not seem to have affected much, the tangible effects these changes will have on businesses may not be revealed until the New Year or even until after Q1. Remember that the Titanic was an unsinkable ship. Oh, except for that pesky iceberg, although barely exposed, was sitting just below the surface, just like the dip in revenues and cost of business issues lurking below the surface of TRID.

It’s also worth noting that the CFPB is now looking for everyone who’s not in compliance with TRID, so the days of untracked and noncompliant business practices are numbered. Which leaves business with no other choice but to change the way they do business.

So even after everyone takes a side today, think about this: Even if everything is okay with the industry, would they even admit it if things weren’t, for fear of repercussions from the CFPB?