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62 Most people, especially new investors, are not saying, "Okay, I quit my job. Now I'm a real estate investor, and that's all I'm going to do." at is not how it works now. Usually, people are continuing their W2 job, and they're saying, "I'm going to start here and buy 1, 2, 3 [properties]." What ends up happening is, the distractions of managing a property are many. It's essential to have that experienced management in place and use them to help build your portfolio. John Vella, CRO, Selene Finance WHAT ARE SOME OF THE PRIMARY HEADWINDS FACING MORTGAGE SERVICERS AS WE APPROACH 2022? Much of what 2022 is going to bring are changes in the regulatory environment. As a result, managing the compliance aspect of your business will be very challenging moving forward—making sure that you're keeping up with all the state and local rules and regulations. e most challenging part will be how do you manage your staff during this time of change? How do you navigate the constant training that will need to be done? Managing turnover, and the transition of working from home and going back into the office, will be very difficult. Over the next year or so, the need for customer contact will become vital. Everyone's going to want answers coming out of forbearance plans. Continuity, call center activity, and offering customers loss mitigation will be critical. Managing all the new rules and regulations around how you contact borrowers will be challenging. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE ESSENTIAL LESSONS YOU HAVE TAKEN AWAY FROM WHAT WE FACED OVER THE PAST 18 MONTHS? IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY? In hindsight, people were more prepared than you would have thought. e ability for the industry to react so quickly to the pandemic and rally around the client and borrower issues was tremendous. What we have learned is that we are in a resilient industry. We are utilizing past experiences that have helped, such as our experience with past disasters. e past crises helped everyone become more prepared for this unknown. It was amazing to see the ability of the industry to rally around the current situation, perform, and keep the borrowers at the forefront. James Vinci, CTO, Selene Finance WHAT ARE THE PRIMARY THINGS SERVICERS NEED TO DO IN PREPARATION FOR ONGOING FORBEARANCE EXITS AND POTENTIAL INCREASED DELINQUENCIES? Being on the technology side of it, what I'm focusing on is scalability. How do we ensure our core system can handle the volume and be reactive, if not proactive? We don't want to be in a spot where we've got to change letters, and it's going to take weeks or months. We need to be able to change letters on the fly. We need to change some of our workout waterfalls, things like that, effectively and quickly. So that's what we're focused on right now: making things more configurable and making sure they can scale rapidly. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE PRIMARY OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF FIGURING OUT THOSE SOLUTIONS AND IMPLEMENTING THEM? e first thing that we did when we sat down and thought about this, maybe a year ago, was decide that we needed to focus on modernizing our base tech stack. So we moved into the Microsoft Azure Cloud, did a ton of training with the team to make sure they're ready to go, and now we're starting to deploy modern apps in modern cloud infrastructure rather than being locked into our legacy approach. Feature By: DS News Staff "Much of what 2022 is going to bring are changes in the regulatory environment. As a result, managing the compliance aspect of your business will be very challenging moving forward." —John Vella, CRO, Selene Finance