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64 e mortgage industry cannot get a break! ere's one crisis after another, each precipitated directly or indirectly by COVID-19 and the nation's reaction to the pandemic. In 2020, we had the refinance boom, fostered by a substantial reduction in interest rates. Industry loan volume doubled in a manner of weeks, creating a loan origination/ processing crisis of immense proportions. e manpower-intensive loan manufacturing process was not well positioned to handle that crisis. Lenders were forced to dramatically increase their underwriting manpower, a task that proved very expensive to do. In some cases, this task has proven impossible to do. As a result, loan throughput stalled and loan quality plummeted. e frustrations of lending executives and potential borrowers grew exponentially. Underwriter manpower was stretched to exhaustion and many newly minted underwriters were drafted into service, ill prepared for the challenges ahead. It requires thousands of man-hours of experience to learn to become a competent underwriter. It requires more than a bit of native talent to become exceptionally productive. New underwriters, lacking the requisite knowledge and experience, had difficulty performing at a high productivity level, especially when loan quality requirements were high and staying that way. As of 2020, the typical underwriter could accomplish an estimated 2.4 underwrites per day while adhering to loan-quality requirements. To meet 2020 volume, that statistic had to more than double with virtually no change in process or technology, or at least that was what the traditional thinking assumed. A bottleneck emerged. Many lenders had far more loans in the queue than current or future manpower could process, especially quickly. A NEW TYPE OF CRISIS In 2021, we will have what appears to be a much different kind of crisis. However, the 2021 crisis will be quite similar in cause to the 2020 crisis: the mortgage industry will simply not have sufficient underwriting manpower to execute on the volume. Shortly, servicers must engage over 2 million borrowers who are exiting the COVID-19 sponsored forbearance plan Feature By: Thomas Showalter FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS Candor Technology's Founder & CEO looks at how the industry can best navigate capacity headwinds and overlapping crises.