Paperless, Not Brainless (Posted December 19, 2016)

Full disclosure: what you’re about to read is a full-blown commercial – no lie. While I’m fairly confident it will be better than 95% of the commercials you’re forced to watch between episodes of your favorite reality show (which is a sort of commercial in and of itself, really), I won’t go so far as to say it’ll be better than some of those you see with Tina Fey or Peyton Manning.

Coming very soon, we will be offering an option that will provide greater speed, simplicity, and certainty for everyone – the real estate agents on both sides of the transaction, the buyer, the seller, the lender, and even the title folks – in the buying/selling process. Here are some key features to whet your appetite:

• Validation of income, assets, and employment will be done electronically.

o Borrowers will be able to save time by using electronic data versus collecting documents such as paystubs, bank statements, and investment account statements. We’re going to call that the “where did I put that?” feature.

• Loan application data will be validated up front making the verification of key loan data points easier and faster.

o This means the originators will have greater confidence at the beginning of the process so they can get it to underwriting more quickly. We’re going to call that the “let’s kick this up to light speed” feature.

• It’s estimated that this will eliminate appraisal conditions on 60% of all purchase transactions – we’re going to call that the “it’s about time” feature.

I hesitate to call this a “no doc” loan for a number of reasons, chief of which being the torrents of cold sweat that term induces for anyone who was in this business back in 2005-06 and stayed around to see their crippling effects on so many. With that said, though, there is a certain beautiful simplicity about the “no doc” aspect of this process: we all get the convenience of not having to hunt high and low for a single piece of paper that can make or break the purchase of a $500,000 home, but we have the security of there being someone in the transaction who is going to verify everything electronically on behalf of all parties.

With that said, I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming of watching whether she says yes to the dress or he’s going to accept help out of his 600-lb life – and you know I’m not talking about Tina Fey or Peyton Manning.

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