Tee off with us as we take you through nine holes of the mortgage process, and find out if your mortgage business is up to par.

The first, most crucial step to being an online mortgage lender is having your rates online. Nine out of ten homebuyers have said they used an online resource at some point during the borrowing process, and if they can’t find your rates while they’re online, they probably won’t be borrowing from you.

Last month we wrote a blog spotlighting our Encompass integration; specifically, the ways in which it helps out lenders by streamlining their processes and allowing them to use a single interface throughout their workflow.

In our efforts to make this integration as useful and accessible to our customers as possible, we’re constantly working to improve and enhance the workflow and experience it provides. It’s this thinking that’s driven us to enhance our LOS integration with Encompass; giving a better and more streamlined experience.

The MBA released a statement this week in response to the introduction of the SAFE Transitional License Act in the Senate. This bill would allow registered loan originators to be granted temporary authority for 120 days to originate mortgage loans when transitioning between federally insured institutions, as well as between states.

There has been quite a bit of talk lately regarding different credit score models and if the mortgage lending industry should allow more than just the traditional FICO.  In the past, many have questioned the accuracy of the FICO, partially due to the complexity of the calculation.  A bill has been introduced in the Senate to address these concerns, called the “Credit Score Competition Act”. 

When it comes to a loan’s profitability, the most important aspect is being able to maintain profit and minimizing time-spend, while keeping your borrower happy by giving them the best possible rate. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, however great borrower engagement is no good if you’re not actually profiting on the loans you’re giving out. What’s worse, spending too much time on profitability and making sure you’re both making profit and giving your borrower the best product can actually hurt you in the long run.

In our latest blog, we wrote a lot on the importance of your mortgage pricing engine saving you time, primarily through integration and automation. That saved time can then be spent on building and maintaining borrower relationships, all while knowing you’ve got the best, quickest, and most accurate data backing you up.

A mortgage business is only as good as its ability to price mortgage rates.

It doesn’t matter how good your team is or how strong your marketing campaigns are (though those things help), if they’re built under a mortgage pricing engine that doesn’t provide you with the best tools and services, they’re all for naught.

What makes a good mortgage pricing engine? What sets some businesses apart from others? For starters: automation. An automated engine that saves you time from having to enter and compare data means you can spend more of that time working with your borrowers. By not having to search, compare, and price mortgage product types based on specific scenarios or manually build in base price SRP, LLPAs, and profit margins, you can focus on communicating with and growing your business while knowing your backed by quick and accurate data.

When the Fed announced in 2016 that the Fed funds rate would be going up, a lot of people wondered what the mortgage landscape would look like in the coming months. However, despite the warnings that mortgage rates could be on the rise, things didn’t escalate at the pace most people predicted. As a result, mortgage data trended differently than many expected:

While rates spiked in mid-March, they then dipped, with their lowest point of the year coming just a month ago. However, once the Fed met in mid-June and announced that the funds rate would rise again, they’ve been steadily increasing for the last month.

Despite rates dipping from March to June, the number of purchase and refinance quotes decreased over that same period. While rates were at their highest in March, that was the same month in which purchase quotes were also at their highest.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this data for the second half of the year to see how these trends play out, and you should be keeping an eye out on how your mortgage business processes as we move toward the end of the year. Fortunately, Mortech makes it easy – simply contact us for a free demo to learn what our mortgage pricing engine can do for you.

One of the most positive benefits of Mortech’s Mortgage APIs are the many ways in which a lender can utilize them for lead capturing. From rate tables to longform applications, lenders are already seeing the benefits of implementing our APIs to build the best way to capture leads for them.

The Federal Reserve has once again raised short-term interest rates another quarter of a percentage point, the fourth increase in a series that began in December 2015. One more increase is expected this year, with three additional increases expected in 2018. We are still well below the 2007 rate of 5.25 percent as we are now in the 1.0-to-1.25 percent range.