The co-founders told MPA how they sought out to do something that has never been done before
In an attempt to revolutionize vendor sourcing in the mortgage industry, Vendor Surf has launched a search engine that encompasses the entire mortgage ecosystem, from originations through secondary markets.
The search engine, VendorSurf.com, features custom filters that span more than 75 vendor categories as Vendor Surf aims to narrow down searches to respond to unique requirements of individual users. The free searches identify vendors from all industry categories and filter them according to various qualifiers such as loan type, product, service, location, and more. Vendor Surf is also setting itself up as an educational resource by allowing searchers and directory vendors to promote events, white papers, trade shows, webinars, and trainings.
Co-founders Scott Roller and Craig Leabig sat down with Mortgage Professional America to talk about how they came up with the idea behind the search engine.
MPA: What is Vendor Surf?
Scott Roller: Vendor Surf is the industry’s first and only search engine that spans the entire mortgage ecosystem, from loan originations to servicing, to default, to secondary markets, and any other sort of players like services that might span the whole industry or technologies that might span the whole industry. It provides a marketplace for people to find one another. Vendors list themselves in hopes of being discovered. And it’s a very exclusive and mortgage-centric space. And then all of the industry participants - of which there are hundreds of thousands - that might be in need of finding a provider for any number of things, they can go and discover.
MPA: It sounds like you’re saying this is the only one in this space. What inspired you to create this?
Craig Leabig: Scott and I spent many years working together in the mortgage industry. We have always had the desire to work together on our own. So Scott had a business model where he was being a matchmaker for vendors and clients that are looking for solutions. And over the past year or a year ago, we said, “How do we make this bigger, how do we expand it and make it more efficient?” And we came up with the idea of creating a website that basically matched these people that were looking for solutions to all the vendors and making it more efficient for them and maximizing the ability for them to find vendors that maybe they didn’t have a view of before, creating transparency for them.
So we had that vision to kind of create this … but we were really sort of just talking to people about it and people were saying, “Wow, that’s an interesting idea, why hasn’t anyone done that?” … So it made it easy for us to decide to go forward with that.
Related stories:
Mortgage vendor oversight platform extended
First American introduces new Vendor Management Suite
The search engine, VendorSurf.com, features custom filters that span more than 75 vendor categories as Vendor Surf aims to narrow down searches to respond to unique requirements of individual users. The free searches identify vendors from all industry categories and filter them according to various qualifiers such as loan type, product, service, location, and more. Vendor Surf is also setting itself up as an educational resource by allowing searchers and directory vendors to promote events, white papers, trade shows, webinars, and trainings.
Co-founders Scott Roller and Craig Leabig sat down with Mortgage Professional America to talk about how they came up with the idea behind the search engine.
MPA: What is Vendor Surf?
Scott Roller: Vendor Surf is the industry’s first and only search engine that spans the entire mortgage ecosystem, from loan originations to servicing, to default, to secondary markets, and any other sort of players like services that might span the whole industry or technologies that might span the whole industry. It provides a marketplace for people to find one another. Vendors list themselves in hopes of being discovered. And it’s a very exclusive and mortgage-centric space. And then all of the industry participants - of which there are hundreds of thousands - that might be in need of finding a provider for any number of things, they can go and discover.
MPA: It sounds like you’re saying this is the only one in this space. What inspired you to create this?
Craig Leabig: Scott and I spent many years working together in the mortgage industry. We have always had the desire to work together on our own. So Scott had a business model where he was being a matchmaker for vendors and clients that are looking for solutions. And over the past year or a year ago, we said, “How do we make this bigger, how do we expand it and make it more efficient?” And we came up with the idea of creating a website that basically matched these people that were looking for solutions to all the vendors and making it more efficient for them and maximizing the ability for them to find vendors that maybe they didn’t have a view of before, creating transparency for them.
So we had that vision to kind of create this … but we were really sort of just talking to people about it and people were saying, “Wow, that’s an interesting idea, why hasn’t anyone done that?” … So it made it easy for us to decide to go forward with that.
Related stories:
Mortgage vendor oversight platform extended
First American introduces new Vendor Management Suite
