Home Equity: A Lasting Asset in an Evolving Housing Market As we near the end of the year and approach 2025, the home equity landscape remains one of resilience. Despite the recent volatility in the housing market, rising interest rates, and a shifting economic landscape, homeowners continue to see significant equity in their homes. While […]
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A Deep Dive into the HousingWire 2024 IMB Summit Earlier this month, we attended the inaugural HousingWire IMB Summit in Dallas where nearly 300 mortgage banking executives gathered to discuss topics and initiatives that move the bottom line – M&A activity, margin compression, channel balance, new products and their tech stack. Here are some of
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Harnessing AI to Streamline Internal Processes and Boost Efficiency Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hot topic across many industries, especially in mortgage and finance. While AI is certainly not a new technology, since the launch of OpenAI’s Chat GPT in November of 2022 it has become more mainstream and usable. Generative AI, specifically, the type
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Selecting the Right AVM Isn’t Hard if You Know the Rules of the Road The use of Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) has increased among lenders over the past few years as an efficient and cost-effective tool for home equity lending. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), more than 75% of home equity loan and
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A Recap of the 2024 Valuation Expo Last month, our CEO Ashley Jelinek, attended the Valuation Expo Conference in Las Vegas along with more than 500 other appraisers, lenders, AMCs and valuation professionals. Recently we sat down with her to get her take on the event. Q: To start off, what was your overall impression
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Key Takeaways New Analysis Shows the Use of AVMs has Significantly Increased Among Home Equity Lenders Given record home equity that American homeowners have amassed due to historically high home price increases since the pandemic, there is a growing expectation that home equity lending will increase over the coming years. According to industry estimates, homeowners
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How to Get Loan Officer Buy-in for an Actively Managed Title Program: A Case History by Jerome Jelinek, Chairman In the first and second installment of this series we examined the advantages of consolidating and actively managing title vendors for refinance transactions. Some of the benefits that we have seen include greater control over pricing,
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Home Appraisal Price-Gap Analysis Shows That Home Appraisals Were Higher Than Sale Prices 51% of the Time It’s fairly common for home appraisals to differ from actual sales prices, particularly with recent record home price appreciation seeing home prices skyrocket. Appraised values indicate what a licensed or certified appraiser believes a home is worth, while
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Tighter Vendor Management is Needed as Wire and Cyber Fraud Risks Grow by Jerome Jelinek, Chairman In our last blog, we discussed the business case for centralizing refinance closings with a core group of preferred title and closing vendors and how this approach enhances operational efficiency, customer experience and compliance. Now in the second blog
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It’s Not Too Early to Start Getting Ready for Refinances by Jerome Jelinek, Chairman Remember refinances? How about the crazy hectic days of 2021 and early 2022? A recent trade publication article suggests those days might be just around the corner again. The article, which interviewed several prominent industry lenders, said that “A likely refinance
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