Southfield, Michigan, June 16, 2009 – Mortgage Builder, a leading loan origination software (LOS) provider, announces it has gone live with its interface to FHA Connection, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s web-based direct access capability, giving lenders the opportunity to vastly streamline their FHA loan activities and save both time and money when originating these loans. FHA Connection, introduced in 1997, is an interactive web link with FHA (Federal Housing Administration) that provides an accelerated means of obtaining case numbers, remitting mortgage insurance, obtaining borrower authorization codes, logging appraisals and accessing various other FHA origination functions. By creating a direct interface with FHA Connection, Mortgage Builder users are able to access the functionality of the HUD system without leaving the Mortgage Builder platform.
“It really speeds things up for us,” says Allison Renaud, chief underwriter and mortgage operations manager with Madison Heights, Michigan-based Peoples State Bank, an early tester of the FHA Connection interface for Mortgage Builder that has been using it successfully for several months. “We use many of the capabilities of FHA Connection,” Renaud explains. “We order case numbers, use it for appraisal assignments and logging, and access a number of other useful functions. Having FHA Connection available directly through Mortgage Builder saves us a lot of time. Instead of leaving our LOS environment and accessing FHA Connection through the Internet, we can do the insurance application in just a few minutes with virtually no data reentry. Before having the direct link through Mortgage Builder, we could spend 15 to 20 minutes just on that one task. It’s been trouble-free,” Renaud says. “During the beta testing phase, anytime I got an error message, I just sent along a screen shot to Mortgage Builder and the next day it was resolved. So even the testing part of the process was painless.”
Bill Mitchell, Mortgage Builder’s vice president of sales, has been doing some unofficial research to determine how much time lenders can save using the FHA Connection. “Our support staff at Mortgage Builder talks to lenders every day and I asked them to take an informal poll on using the FHA Connection interface,” he says. “They found that lenders using it reported saving anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes per loan in processing time. So for every 80 or so FHA loans a company originates, there’s the potential for them to save 40 to 80 hours by using this direct interface with FHA Connection instead of leaving the LOS and logging in separately,” he notes, adding, “That’s the cost equivalent of one or two full time employees for a week per month. It really adds up for lenders doing hundreds of FHA loans every month.”
Mortgage Builder is one of the very few LOS providers whose platform is integrated with the FHA Connection,” according to Mitchell. “We’ve been doing FHA loans for over twenty years, so it was natural for us to be among the first to provide the direct interface,” he says. “FHA lending is an integral part of our corporate culture and it is important to us to provide the best possible experience to our FHA users.” Allison Renaud, who has been using Mortgage Builder for much of her career, agrees that the FHA Connection interface substantially improves the experience for lenders. “Throughout the entire loan process, being integrated with FHA makes a dramatic difference,” she says. “We order case numbers and assignments at the push of a button now and save all the time we would otherwise be losing. It’s a great thing.”
About Mortgage Builder
Headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, Mortgage Builder Software, Inc. has been providing industry-leading loan origination software (LOS) to mortgage banks, community banks, credit unions and financial institutions for more than eleven years. An innovator since its earliest days, Mortgage Builder was the first LOS to provide its full capabilities in Application Service Provider (ASP) form, as Software as a Service (SaaS) and in the traditional licensed, server-based configuration, providing complete flexibility to suit all clients’ business models. Mortgage Builder is an end-to-end lending solution for both retail and wholesale mortgage production channels, delivering pre-qualification tools, processing, underwriting, closing, post-closing, final document tracking, secondary marketing, warehousing, delivery, interim servicing and construction loan tracking. Electronic document management and compliant loan documents are included at no additional cost to lenders along with many other features that bring new levels of efficiency and cost savings to clients. Third party originator web portals and consumer-facing web tools are also available, enhancing flexibility. Mortgage Builder maintains the highest customer retention rate in the industry, as well as the highest implementation success rate. The company has been named by Mortgage Technology Magazine as one of the industry’s Top 50 Service Providers for the third consecutive year (2009, 2008 and 2007), was a finalist for Mortgage Technology’s coveted 2007 Help Desk Award, and was the winner of the magazine’s 2008/2009 Help Desk award. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding customer service and the industry’s best technical support. For more information, visit www.MortgageBuilder.com.
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