Annual Subscription Billing and How to Sign Up

Purview For Mortgage Brokers now offers subscription billing! Want more info? Here it is!

Purview For Mortgage Brokers just made doing your job that much easier! Contact Rudy Naraine at rudy.naraine@teranet.ca or 416.643.1027 to learn more about subscription billing.

Attn: Mortgage Brokers and Agents: Automated Valuation Models and How They Impact You

Your plate is full. As a mortgage broker or agent you yourself are charged with the task of running your own little business. This means marketing, sales, customer service, underwriting, administration and more… We know, we’re preaching to the choir.

Being primed to manage the highest volume of business means being as efficient as possible. One way to do this is to have measures in place to:

• Identify new mortgage opportunities within your portfolio or an upsell opportunity on a deal
• Perform due diligence quickly and avoid bad deals
• To be better aligned with your lenders, reviewing the same information that they do through the application/underwriting process

All roads lead back to automated valuation models. There are many different types of automated valuation models that are used by both lenders and insurers. Automated valuation models are mathematically-based computer programs that produce an estimate of the market value of a residential property based on: public record data, property location, market conditions and real estate characteristics.

Lenders use automated valuation models for many reasons, but one primary reason is to validate a property’s value. Just like your closing rates with your lender matter, your lender’s closing rates with their insurer matter. Professionals recognize that time lost on bad deals not only causes financial losses, it can also damage relationships.

Most lenders use AVMs, even when they also use appraisals, and even when the deal has to go to the insurers. Automated valuation models can be used alone or together with an appraisal.

Looking back to the beginning of this blog, automated valuation models are a measure you can put in place to:

Identify new mortgage opportunities:

• Running AVMs on clients who are mid-term may identify areas where properties have seen a considerable increase in property value. This may present refinance opportunities like a HELOC or a second mortgage.

Vet new applicants:

• Running an AVM on a new applicant can both:

o   Flush out a client applying for a mortgage on a property that is not worth the stated value saving you valuable time and also;

o   Identify applicants who have more equity than they think, meaning you may be able to pitch an upsell – larger mortgage or a secondary product.

Automated valuation models strengthen lender relationships. Using an AVM that is commonly used by lenders means that you will be aligned with your lender when it comes to viewing relative information. Purview, for example, offers a product to lenders and mortgage brokers/agents. This means if the same criteria were entered, the lender and broker, through viewing an AVM, would see a similar result in terms of the value produced. Catching deals before they get to your lender saves your lender valuable time and cost, which they certainly will appreciate.

Because AVMs are so widely used by lenders, brokers and agents can’t afford to not acknowledge their existence, impact and value. Purview For Mortgage Brokers makes creating this alignment easy. Contact us today at 1.855.787.8439. 

How to Identify Mortgage Refinance Opportunities

Learning how to identify mortgage refinance opportunities is as simple as thinking outside the box. Fortunately for Canadian mortgage brokers and agents, a strong Canadian housing market has continued to see property values skyrocket in most urban centres across the country.

This past month, The Teranet-National Bank House price index released their report stating that Toronto saw a 7.24% increase in housing values over 2013:  www.housepriceindex.ca. On the other side of the country, The Teranet-House Price Index showed Vancouver with a 4.96% year over year increase.  The Vancouver Sun reported that single family homes have seen a 6.5% increase with some areas having increased in value over 11%! http://ow.ly/IX2WJ.

What does this mean to you? Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity! Now let’s get to thinking outside the box! With incredibly low interest rates continuing to be the norm, many homeowners are opting for 5 year mortgages when purchasing a home. Some agents and brokers see their next opportunity being the point at which these mortgages come up for renewal.

A flourishing housing market combined with lenders diversifying and offering more and more competitive secondary financing products such as secured lines of credit means that, in fact, a client with a 5 year term or even longer may be primed in 2-3 years to look at finding the financing to complete home renovations or financing their kids’ educations through their home equity – which often results in far less interest than unsecured credit products.

Maximizing this opportunity means staying on top of your portfolio to know when there is an opportunity to make the pitch. How do you do this? By leveraging the tools that help you identify when this opportunity arises.

Identifying these opportunities is as simple as knowing which clients have enough equity in their home to warrant a refinance: secondary financing in the case of a client who may be mid-term and even primary financing where your client is actually approaching renewal.

Particularly in the urban centres mentioned earlier, it can be really difficult to simply guess what your clients’ homes are worth to be able to see how much opportunity there is.

Your first step is to look at an AVM (Automated Valuation Model) and corresponding Property Report. This is an automated report that will generate an estimated value of any given property. Purview For Mortgage Brokers is an example of an affordable subscription-based product that many brokers use to look for refinance opportunities within their portfolios.

Your next step is to come up with ideas regarding what you can pitch to your prospective client. A client in an aging home may be in the market to renovate, while a client with a higher TDS at the time they purchased the home may be in the market for a debt consolidation.

You can be the gift that keeps on giving by first being the broker or agent who helped them achieve their goal of buying their dream home and then later coming forward to show them how they can use that home to achieve financial and personal goals that otherwise might be unattainable.

For more about how to identify mortgage refinance opportunities and take advantage of them please contact Purview For Mortgage Brokers today by calling 1.855.787.8439.

Brokers (Broker Owners): What You Can Do to Support Your Agents and Be More Efficient

Broker owners: well it couldn’t be more obvious that the better your agents perform, the better you do overall. Every brokerage has its higher-producing agents that are a sure bet for closed deals each and every month, put the often-asked question remains: how can you get all - not just some - agents to produce more, good business that closes?

To drill down and look at how this can be achieved means first looking at the reasons that some agents continually struggle to close deals. Some agents follow a simple philosophy: more applications = more business, but this is often not the case. Better qualified and underwritten applications mean more business. Business isn’t business until the deal closes!

Grabbing as many apps as you can just to try to increase the probability of more closed deals can actually be counter-productive. In fact, we often come across broker owners who indicate that one of the greatest sources of frustration is in fact incomplete and poorly underwritten applications.

The challenge here is that you may see a bigger picture that your agents may not:

·         Low closure rates damage relationships with lenders.

·         Applications that are poorly underwritten and have undisclosed information damage and frustrate relationships with lenders.

·         The time wasted on a deal that fails to close could have meant several good deals had the agent’s time been allocated to driving in new business vs. working deals that may not happen.

As a mortgage brokerage owner your agents are largely independent and so the best way to support your agents to be more efficient is to invest in educating them and giving them access to the tools that they will need to do a better job – whether you are there to hold their hand or not.

Determining where this investment should be made boils down to looking at the common reasons why deals don’t make it from the application stage to the point of funding.

Un/mis-disclosed information continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing agents and brokers today. Most consumers fail to disclose or mis-disclose information by omission (they didn’t know something was relevant) or because they simply didn’t know/forgot. Sometimes this non-disclosure is less innocent. Often third parties refer business and the information the third party provides is not totally correct. This could relate to a property’s value, who is on title to a property, or even equity in a property.

Often issues will not surface until after a deal has been submitted to a lender, or worse, until it is with the lawyer pending closing.

Your agents access credit reports because many lenders approve and fund mortgage financing based on the state of a customer’s credit. Your agents review a customer’s credit because they know that the lender will too and there is no point in submitting a deal that doesn’t qualify.

Many lenders now use AVMs (Automated Valuation Model) and Property Reports to estimate a property’s value, calculate equity information based on the registered mortgages on title and utilize other pertinent information such as ownership – an AVM and corresponding Property Report is almost like running a credit report, but on the property. Many broker owners have caught on that, like a credit report, requesting an AVM & Property Report at the application stage is your agent’s first line of defence against working on a deal that is unlikely to close due to not having the whole picture.

Most AVMs and Property Reports are available online and are an inexpensive way to offer your brokers access to a tool that will lead to more efficiency and a better producing brokerage.

For more information on the tools that will help you increase productivity and help your agents close more deals please contact Purview For Mortgage Brokers today by calling 1.855.787.8439.