With all the complexities involved in the management of distressed real estate assets, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors president Steven Horne said his company finds a literal overview of all of them is useful in drawing up strategies for handling the work.
“This is almost more of an air-traffic control process than a servicing process” in terms of “coordinating many different activities simultaneously,” he said, describing in-house technology the company has in an interview at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference.
He said technology the company has that does this can be used for a variety for real estate management purposes and cited short sales as an example.
“How is the typical short sale scenario played out? You have a real estate agent sitting in their car, on their cell phone, shuffling through a bunch of paperwork that they are not familiar with and don’t understand, calling an 800 number for a servicer, sitting on hold, talking to a different person every time they call in, filling out the paperwork by hand, in a rush. They’ve got nine other things they’d rather be doing and so it projects so much error into the process.
“So what we do is, we’ve automated it all,” said Horne.
Interestingly, Horne said that the effort originated with second mortgage servicing work that did but grew into something that could be applied more broadly.
“If you’re servicing a big portfolio of second mortgages there are really only two things you want to have happen at the end of the day: you either want borrowers to start paying you again or you want them to go to short sale because you have no equity,” he explained. “We’ve been servicing seconds for a long, long time. So we already have relationships with all of the primary servicers. We know exactly what their requirements are.”
Horne said the technology is helpful in terms of gathering data more efficiently and helping to ensure that those data are more complete, accurate and legible.
“A surprising number of [workout attempts] are turned down because [related documents] are not legible and compliant with, not only all federal or regulatory requirements, but...also the servicers’ specific requirements,” he said. “So if 'Servicer A’ wants to see a photocopy of the drivers license along with everything else, we want to make sure that that comes through.”
The technology is accessible through an Internet portal and can be accessed by agents, homeowners and primary services through any Internet access point, which in some cases may be a smartphone or iPad. However, Horne said his sense was more are still using home or office computers to access it.
He said the information comes in a “decisionable” format that users can take quick action on. “And, happily, what we’ve discovered is if we give it to them in that decisionable format, they will” act on it, Horne said.
Parts of the automation have been adapted from available systems and some of it was created in-house, he said.
In terms of presentation at management level, Horne said the information is presented on a 55-inch flat-panel television with a touch screen overlay on it. The information can be viewed on a mapped/geo-coded basis or in other ways, such as in bar chart form. It is used on top of a database structure where third party data from internal systems are aggregated into a single, trusted source, he said.
This allows company executives, for example, to see where their priorities are at property level.
“You can see where your delays are, where your costs are and where your returns are being generated. It’s a nice way to visualize the data,” Horne said.
“You can drill all the way down...to coordinate with the agents in the field,” he added, noting that this information is presented real-time.
When asked if Wingspan, which among its division has a technology unit, offered the technology externally or had it only for external use, Horne said executives might be willing to discuss the latter if there was interest. But he added, “We’re mostly just using it for our own purposes at this point.”
