Walmart mortgages – Lenders One strikes deal to sell at store

Soon when you go to Walmart for bread, milk, eggs and a large-screen television, you might also pick up a mortgage for a new home. Atlanta-based Lenders One Cooperative, a national alliance of independent mortgage bankers, recently signed a deal to have locations for its members inside of select Walmart stores.

“We feel it’s extremely significant for our members’ banks to be able to fill the top of their funnel in a declining origination space,” Lenders One president Justin Demola (pictured) told Mortgage Professional America in a telephone interview. “They will have physical locations. Generally speaking, those locations are around the checkout areas or the entry and exit areas, between the other retailers, such as Dunkin’ Donuts and so on, and very close to the Walmart customer service area.”

The company currently has three stores in the permit phase, Demola said, with the first store expected to be up and running by May 01.

“Buildout is relatively easy,” he noted. By the end of the third quarter, the company expects to have 10 more stores, the company president said, with 20 total leases signed by the end of the year. The first locations are located in the New Jersey area, he said.

Demola said the initial array of products will include mortgages, purchases, refinancing and home equity loans. Other products to be offered will be up to the cooperative’s members, he added.

Read more: Lenders One brings in former MBA executive

The Walmart arrangement is one of several initiatives the cooperative has launched to help its members. Demola pointed to two other key initiatives that were launched recently to help improve members’ profitability, manufacture loans more efficiently and close more loans:

• L1 Credit, a full credit reporting agency [CRA] designed to offer members full tri-merge credit reports and other Fair Credit Reporting Act-related products required to manufacture a loan – including fraud reports; undisclosed debt notifications; verification of employment; verification of assets; tax return information; and Social Security verification reports. Demola noted that L1 Credit is the first CRA to be launched in the past five or six years. “We’re fully disrupting the market in the credit space,” he said.
• Lenders One Loan Automation (LOLA), an internally developed, cloud-based technology solution designed to automate the loan manufacturing process to improve members’ operational efficiency and make it easier for members to order and receive L1 Solutions through a single point of entry without human intervention. The technology is offered for free to its members, Demola said.

Prior to those products being launched, Lenders One, in 2018, made an eClosing solution available to its members. The alliance announced the launch at its annual summer conference, saying the solution would offer an entirely paperless workflow that integrates every component of the closing process and guides users through each step.

Lenders One eClosing by DocMagic can cut the average loan closing “at the table” from 60 minutes to just 15, creating significant time and efficiency savings for lenders and their customers, officials noted at the time. The eClosing solution incorporates feedback received from members and service providers, one top executive said. The technology was described as adapting to the lenders’ production environment and compressing the overall timeline to loan sale – generating material savings for lenders facing historically high loan production costs.

Read next: Lenders One announces mortgage veteran as leader

The Walmart deal comes on the heels of the company’s appointment of Tricia Migliazzo as its senior vice president of origination sales. With more than two decades of mortgage banking experience, Migliazzo heads the company’s membership and product offerings, including CastleLine risk management and insurance, Premium Title title and settlement, Trelix mortgage fulfillment, Springhouse appraisal, and valuation services.

Founded in 2000, Lenders One, a retail lending subsidiary of Altisource, has a network of more than 250 independent banks, mortgage bankers, correspondent lenders credit unions, and suppliers of mortgage products and services. For its part, Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart Inc. is a multinational retail company that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores and grocery stores.