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138 Obama's New Executive Actions. e president outlined a program de- signed to provide financial and homeowner protections to members of the military and their families in an official White House press release in August. One such protec- tion is preventing foreclosures on homes of active military personnel, which is part of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) of 2003. To help achieve the goal outlined by the president in August, Quandis recently launched Quandis Servicemember Out- reach (QSO), a website designed to identify active military personnel quickly and easily by utilizing back-end technology to scrub lenders' loan portfolios. e website's detailed scrub of the Department of Defense website includes name permutation, validation, and normalization in order to check all pos- sible name variations and statuses of active military members to ensure compliance with the SCRA. QSO also provides information for lend- ers and servicers to proactively reach out to those who the website identifies as eligible for SCRA benefits, notify them of their op- tions via email, and simplify the application process. With QSO dashboards, lenders can not only generate docs, but they can track each search activity and keep a history log of outreach program efforts and responses. Many banks and lenders have already partnered with the White House in order to implement the president's program. "e White House has spoken loud and clear: Banks and servicers must make every possible attempt to locate active military personnel, make them fully aware of their benefits, and adhere to the SCRA," said Scott Stoddard, CEO of Quandis. "It is completely remiss of banks and servicers to ignore the White House's request to partner with them and bring relief to servicemembers, veterans, and their families." In addition to QSO, Quandis offers an existing standalone military search service that foreclosure attorneys, servicers, banks, lenders, and third-party outsource providers use. RealtyTrac Launches Expansive Data Mining Platform Irvine, California-based comprehensive real estate data provider RealtyTrac has an- nounced the launch of an expanded version of its MEGA Lead Generation Platform. Using the new expanded platform, customers will have access to RealtyTrac's database that includes more than 118 million U.S. properties, and they will be able to use a convenient online interface to create targeted marketing lists on the fly using data that is updated in real time. Registration to access the data with MEGA Lead Generation Platform is free, and customers pay per property record down- loaded. Customers can preview the number of records that match their search criteria before downloading the data. "Previously our customers have been able to mine RealtyTrac's proprietary foreclosure data to create targeted mailing lists of distressed property owners, a list already highly useful to a diverse set of industry verticals, including agents, brokers, investors, and attorneys," said Jamie Moyle, CEO at RealtyTrac. "But that dataset was frankly a drop in the bucket compared to what is available now. We've exponentially expanded the available universe of properties from around 1 million previously to more than 118 million now and added scores of new property attributes to enable even more powerful lead filtering. is opens up myriad new marketing list applications for virtually every type of business looking to market its products and services to a specific subset of U.S. property owners." With the MEGA Lead Generation Platform, customers can sort the real estate data by geography (such as state, county, city, ZIP code, or a radius search around a ZIP code), property type (residential, commercial, single-family, multifamily, condo, and more), property characteristics (square footage, lot size, year built, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and even whether or not the property has a swimming pool), sales history for the property, loan and lender informa- tion, the amount of home equity, occupancy status, owner location and information, foreclosure status (default, scheduled for auction, or REO, as well as the owner in de- fault, the foreclosing lender, and the trustee or attorney), and bankruptcy status of the property owner. "Our customers have been clamoring for this expanded real estate dataset for quite some time, and we are extremely pleased to be able to provide it to them," said Tyler White, director of data solutions at Realty- Trac. "Along with the data itself, the new platform incorporates dozens of filters to help customers precisely target the best candi- dates for their services, saving money on lead generation while increasing the response rate on their direct mail campaigns." Other potential applications of the new expanded platform: List brokers can offer no-obligation record counts in real time; attorneys can find property owners in need of legal assistance filtering the information by foreclosure status or lender/servicer involved; home improvement or repair companies can target those who recently purchased properties in need of repair, or they can target investors who are repeat customers; real estate agents can generate lists of potential property sellers who may be about to sell; retail com- panies can target owners of recently pur- chased properties who may be in need of their products or services; credit repair companies can target distressed homeowners or those who have lost their properties and may be in need of their services (forwarding address is included if the homeowner has moved); in- surance companies can sort through the data to find potential new clients, including those who are nearing their insurance renewal date; and real estate investors can locate potential clients by using the data to identify distressed property owners who may be motivated to sell, or property owners who match their investing strategy. "As the housing recovery takes hold and the distressed share of the market decreases, entrepreneurs are looking for new opportuni- ties to contact homeowners who need a prob- lem solved or a service provided," said Brian Mushaney, EVP of data solutions at Real- tyTrac. "We believe this expanded platform helps further our mission of providing more data to more people, and we're excited to see how customers creatively utilize this data." CFPB Penalizes California Mortgage Lender for Illegally Compensating Employees e Consumer Financial Protection Bu- reau (CFPB) announced that it has ordered California-based residential mortgage lender Franklin Loan Corporation to pay $730,000 in restitution for rewarding its employees with bonuses for suggesting loans with higher interest rates to borrowers. Franklin Loan, which has 18 locations in Southern California and one in Chicago, originated about $887 million in mortgage loans between 2011 and 2013, according to CFPB. e Bureau's investigation revealed