Jennings sees four main impacts from the CFPB mortgage disclosure ruling:
1. New disclosure forms, including the Loan Estimate and the Closing Disclosure.
2. New time table for delivery – a loan estimate needs to be delivered three days after the application; closing disclosure needs to be delivered three days prior to closing.
3. The final rule limits the circumstances in which borrowers may be required to pay more for settlement services than the amount listed on the Loan Estimate.
4. Lenders are required to maintain records evidencing compliance and encourage those records to be in a “machine-readable format.”
All of the above pose an operational challenge for lenders that can trickle down to real estate brokers, and can only be addressed using technology. The mortgage and settlement services industries, however, have cooperated to build a common operating system and shared technology infrastructure. Jennings’s company, RealEC, is targeting its Closing Insight platform to help lenders move toward compliance faster.
“We’re going to leverage the pieces of our programs to revive and standardize the closing process. We’re creating tools to help banks collect fees up front and create more collaboration between the lender and the closing agent.”
Leveraging Industry Assets
While real estate-related technology will continue to progress and raise a series of pros and cons for real estate professionals and their customers, CIO Roundtable attendees agree that the biggest technological challenge for the industry will revolve around the data. According to Frame, the future of the MLS will be a conversation that continues for quite some time.
RPR, which licenses and aggregates data from MLSs and other data sources, has compiled a cohesive, national database of property information. RPR currently houses more than 98 percent of U.S. property records.
“The way we think of ourselves as a company and as an asset is as a database platform,” says Frame. “We provide applications and feature access to leverage the data, but, in simple terms, the core of what RPR does is to compile a large amount of data every day.”
According to Frame, the elements of a connective, national real-estate technology platform would include:
• Market information – all active and historical listings
• Property characteristics – the foundation layer
• Recordings – all documented transfers
• Mortgages – liens, loans and current position
• Distressed assets – including disposition incentives
• Geographic data – for location and summarization
• Economic drivers – business and government data
• Practitioners – firm, their associates and brokers
Ross added, “We have to see if there is a better way of doing business that doesn’t compete, but leverages, and makes our agents more productive. RPR has spent five years and made a significant investment in providing solutions, and we’re moving in the right direction. We’re the only technology provider whose sole incentive is to lower our members’ costs while making them more efficient. We’re not going to change the industry overnight, but we can save it some money.”
“Can a national level of collaboration occur?” asked Frame. “There’s momentum for execution, but will we get there this time? Change is already in the air, but it will come down to cost and scale. The lending example shows how even the largest companies cannot go it alone in the current environment. The necessity of pooling your resources to confront this challenge is absolute.”
For more information, visitwww.narrpr.com
