TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
Issue link: http://digital.themreport.com/i/958155
22 | TH E M R EP O RT FEATURE • • Rental-tech•is not widely tracked in our purchase and refi-centric industry, but it is growing and so worth mentioning. Startups are creating portals and apps to address the increasing importance of both the single-family home and apartment rental markets. In fact, Nooklyn recently raised a seed round to create an end-to-end leasing product for rentals and roommates. Expect this trend to grow as TechCrunch reported in August that at least 108 real estate pure-tech startups (only in North America) garnered over $400 million in funding. 4. Digital Mortgage T he digital transformation of the mortgage application process continues to unfold. This is great news for consumers saddled with gathering all kinds of documentation from numerous sources. Many of the new, specialty tech firms are laser-focused on improving overlooked, yet troublesome and time-consuming, aspects of the mortgage application process. After all, who likes look- ing for copies of W-2s and bank statements, or having to ensure correct employment verification? Watch for announcements from Silicon Valley tech firm, Blend, who recently became the first end-to-end platform to be approved by Fannie Mae to provide asset verification reports for Desktop Underwriter as part of Day 1 Certainty. 5. eClosing I f there was ever a real estate-related technology that took a long time to gain adoption, it was electronic closing or "eClosing" for short. eClosing is the name given to the elimination of the paper from the real estate and mortgage closing through the use of technology. As the CFPB pointed out in their eClosing Pilot of 2015, "eClosing is a win-win for consumers and industry alike." In 2017, we saw rapid adoption of eClosing technology from mortgage lenders seeking to improve the consumer experience, while also eliminating common "Nine of the new Forbes Fintech 50 are blockchain startups with their sights set on much more than cryptocurrencies. The opportunities are endless, especially around improving collaboration in the transaction process among the parties (and the identification of those parties)."