As the refinance market continues to dry up, finding new ways to retain existing customers in today’s mortgage environment is growing in importance. This is, unfortunately, not that simple of a task. Lenders can wait until a borrower’s house is on the market, but then must compete against other lenders for their business. The other option is casting a wide net across all of your servicing portfolio, in the hopes of finding that borrower that is about to list. Doing this, though, causes an increased marketing spend for minimal results.

A new conventional product option has been announced by Freddie Mac and will be available starting July 29, 2018. The HomeOne mortgage is similar to the Home Possible Advantage option currently offered by Freddie Mac, but will be focused on first time homebuyers. This is a low down payment option with a down payment requirement of only 3 percent and requires no geographic or income restrictions.

Last week, Mortech announced a new integration with Arch MI. Through this integration, all Mortech users get immediate access to Arch MI RateStar quotes included in every applicable scenario, resulting in a faster workflow when Mortech users quote mortgage insurance-eligible products.

We wrote recently about why you should become a supported investor with Mortech’s mortgage pricing engine. We included a number of reasons, chief among them being the national footprint you have access to, with the ability to control who can and can’t see your products. Once you become a supported investor and want to let all those people know your products are available though, how do you market yourself?

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) recently announced an increase to the target range of the federal funds rate to 1.5 to 1.75 percent. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in his first meeting as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve approved the increase. This is in response to the strong economic outlook in recent months. The FOMC expects this to continue with gradual adjustments to monetary policy.

Digital mortgages are seeing an uptick in the number of systems people are using. With point-of-sales becoming a growing part of daily workflows, you might be tempted to add them to your suite of tools, coupling them with customer relationship management (CRM) and loan origination systems (LOS).

Finding the right pricing engine to become a supported investor on can be difficult. You need to make sure that the company you trust isn’t just putting your products in front of anybody and everybody, but in front of the right borrowers and in the right location. Not only that, but you need the rates that pricing engine is quoting to be accurate and updated at all times, so that borrowers are getting all of the right information, and preventing looking like you’re offering old or inaccurate rates.

Our user base stretches across the country, with each region of the U.S. accounting for at least 6% of our rate quote volume so far through 2018. No matter where your customers are using your products, Mortech has users there. Only want your products available in one region? With Mortech, you don’t have to worry about not having coverage.

Mortech can create and upload a wide variety of custom rate sheets to offer in our mortgage engine. We’ll also automatically update those rate sheets whenever intraday rate changes occur. Your rates won’t just be accurate at all times, but you won’t have to worry about being the one constantly going in and updating them.

There can be a lot of fear with trying to quote your rates online to multiple marketplaces. Getting your rates pushed to your own website is tough on its own, but trying to manage and maintain rates on different marketplaces around the web is even tougher. Constantly having to check and update those rates can be daunting, and hesitating to jump into online quoting is understandable.

Changes to Dodd-Frank are one step closer to being realized this week with modifications passing the Senate with a vote of 67-31. The bill, sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), is being presented as a way to diminish the negative impact the law has had on small banks and credit unions, according to The Hill. Those in opposition of the changes such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) believe the bill favors "special interests and Wall Street."

We’ve written about the advantages that come with online quoting through Mortech. We can help you get your rates in the right online marketplaces to thousands of borrowers through lead sources like Zillow^®, LendingTree^®, and Bankrate^®. However, we can also get your rates on lead sources that can play to your strengths when it comes to quoting specific products and/or to specific buyers. Our account management team has years of mortgage experience, and are well-versed in finding the right fit for mortgage businesses who are trying to do online quoting.