How and Why to Verify Property Ownership Information When Working on a Deal

Mortgage brokers and agents take many measures when working on deals to ensure that the information provided by the applicant is correct. They do this to ensure that their deal is solid and to protect their lenders. While brokers and agents have to validate things like income, credit and down payment in order to get their client financing, they don’t really have to verify other information like who the legal homeowner of the property is. This is often left it up to the lawyer on closing to perform any searches to validate legal ownership.

The question is then, should the agent or broker take the steps to validate who the legal homeowner of a property is? In the event that a property is being refinanced, absolutely.

There are many benefits to ensuring that a property is in fact in the applicant’s name, that they are the legal owner and that there is no one else on title.

Firstly, this goes a long way in preventing mortgage fraud. You can also reduce the number of deals that have problems on closing - saving you time and money. Additionally, you can strengthen relationships with lenders by catching deals that have issues before they get to the lender, thus increasing your closure rates.

It is clear that verifying property ownership information when working on a deal is pertinent – so how do you do it?

Well there are many different ways that you can go about accessing home ownership information – some tools provide value added extras while others do not. This is even true within Teranet. Teranet offers a host of different real estate mapping tools – and some offer different features than others depending on the industry being served.

Purview for Mortgage Brokers is an application that mortgage brokers and agents can use to validate home ownership information. We brought up extras because in this instance the application is designed specifically for mortgage agents and brokers – which means it offers additional features.

Using this application you can validate homeowner information, view registered mortgages on title, validate property value, look at sales comparables and the sales history on the property in question and more…

There are so many reasons to validate home ownership information when working on a deal and so many ways to do it – the question is, if you’re not validating homeownership information, why not?

For more information about how you can validate home ownership information please visit www.purview.ca/brokers or call 1-855-787-8439.