07-11-2022 Hot Topic: Digital Transformation: Generating an Upfront Verified Approval
In our episode this week, we have Brent Emler, Director of Sales @ Lender Toolkit, & Michael Whitbeck, CEO @ BLUEPRINT, here to discuss what the definition of a verified approval is and how is it different than a prequel, as well as what kind of edge they see a verified approval giving sales teams.
Want to know more aboutBrent Emler?
Brent Emler is the Director of Sales at Lender Toolkit, a leading mortgage technology firm focused on digitizing and automating the mortgage manufacturing process. Brent is committed to providing solutions to business problems by promoting curiosity, innovation, and exploiting technology solutions. Working with many of the largest lenders in the country affords Brent and the team at Lender Toolkit the opportunity to deliver cutting-edge technology solutions.
Want to know more aboutMichael Whitbeck
Creator and lead trainer of the "10 point process to almost perfect underwriting" system built using my 27+ years in the mortgage industry experience.
NEWS...."IT HAPPENED! Elon Musk's $10000 House FINALLY Hitting The Market"
---
Hot Topic: Digital Transformation: Generating An Upfront Verified Approval With Brent Emler And Michael Whitbeck
Joining me on this episode is all the regulars, but we've got Jack Nunnery. Jack, it’s so good to have you here, my co-host. I appreciate you. This show is created by mortgage professionals. It is for mortgage professionals and we're so grateful to have you as our audience. Our commitment is to bring you timely information that you can use anytime, anywhere. When I mean anywhere, we're making sure we're alive on every available channel. Now, for whatever reason, the vast majority of our downloads come as a result of Apple Podcast subscribers. Some are still subscribed to the Blog Talk Radio. Here's what I’m asking everybody. We’re even going to talk about this at the beginning of each program. Be sure to check how you are subscribing to this show. The good news is now we're only showing up once. We're showing up at least three times, thanks to our friends at Podetize, who we're now working with. I got to tell you Tom Hazzard and his wife own that company are doing an amazing job. Their services are over the top. Shout-out to Tom Hazzard and the team at Podetize for all they've done to help advance our game. In today's Hot Topic, we've got Brent Emler, the Director of Sales at Lender Toolkit, and Mike Whitbeck, the CEO of Blueprint. It's very interesting to see some of the things that are available out there. Blueprint approaches automated underwriting. That is a good Hot Topic segment. Brent and Michael did a great job. Special thank you goes out to our sponsors. A Finastra Fusion Mortgagebot Solution does a great job with the robust features that help you connect with user-defying groups for processors and underwriters. They got the open API. FormFree has completed over 3 trillion in loan verification that helps lenders lower operating costs. We're all looking for a way to go about lowering operating costs. Also, Lender Toolkit, which is on our today's episode. Snapdocs does a great phenomenal job working backward from a future where every closing is a flawless experience. We're getting more and more flawless with the advent of technology, but there are still a lot of errors that need to be eradicated and Snapdocs does a great job. My absolutely favorite CRM in the world is Total Expert. We have them as a customer, a client, and an advertiser. They have built-in customer journeys that give lenders a starting place for nurturing campaigns. Check them out as well as SimpleNexus. We had Shane Westra on, along with Jay Arneja, and they did a great job. That was on June 27th, 2022. Our regulars sponsors are the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, Lenders One, the Mortgage Collaborative, SuccessKit, Knowledge Coop, Mobility MMI, Modex, the Mortgage Advisory Tools, as well as DW Consulting. Debbie Wemyss does help you with your LinkedIn connection. Finally, I want to say a special thank you to Adam of the MBA, Les Parker, Matt with Market Update, Alice, Allen, and Jack. We're excited about this episode, so enjoy it.
---
Folks, I’m excited to have Brent Emler and Michael Whitbeck joining us. We've got some exciting developments happening and the way of saving costs and improving efficiencies. I’m excited to get started on it. Brent Emler, it’s good to have you here.
Thank you, David. Always a pleasure.
Many people know who you are. He's a Director of Sales at Lender Toolkit. I’m very excited to have him here joining us. Tell us a little bit about our co-guest here, Michael Whitbeck.
David, I met Michael in 2021 and then I met him in person for the first time at Experience 2022 down in Las Vegas. I’ve always been incredibly impressed with not just Michael's knowledge of underwriting and I think you'll see that play itself out in this interview, but his passion for underwriting. It's such an important part of our industry and his understanding of technology and being able to leverage it against his mortgage underwriting knowledge to deliver great solutions. We're very excited to be working alongside BLUEPRINT and delivering a terrific solution for the industry. It's going to be a great discussion, David.
Michael, welcome to the show. Good to have you here as a first-time guest. I’m honored.
Thanks a lot. I’ve been around the industry for a few years myself. I’ve heard quite a few of your shows and I probably met you guys randomly throughout there at the different trade shows. I appreciate the time on the show.
I remember seeing you. I don't think we had a chance to visit when we were at the Lender Toolkits event in Las Vegas that preceded the Experience Conference. It's so good to see you out there, not only on the racetrack but also here. I also found that we have a couple of other things. We both are DE underwriters and have a strong itinerary background. You are a pilot and I love the fact that we have that in common as well.
You're going to know as an underwriter that there are a lot of similarities. I always joke around like, “There's no school for underwriting. You can go to college and get an Underwriting degree, but you can get some good background. If they can teach this old dog to fly an airplane, not count myself, I can teach people how to underwrite and not blow up loans.” If you follow a system in a process and get the education and the mentoring you need, you're going to be fine.
Verified Approval: If you follow a system in a process and get the education and the mentoring you need, you're going to be just fine.Michael, tell us a little bit about your background other than you're a pilot and underwriter, a little bit of your journey to where you're at now.
I live outside Detroit, Michigan. A little suburb called Novi. I graduate high school. I wasn't ready for college, frankly. I didn't want to do any more school. I joined the Army and tried to fly back then. After a couple of years and a few combat patches, I got out and a friend of mine in the Army said, “I have a job where I shoot artillery and blow things up. It doesn't apply to the civilian world very well. You should get in the mortgage business.” I came back up here to Michigan when I was 23 and stationed at the 82nd Airborne in North Carolina.
I came back this way, married with a child in tow, and got a job at a little company called Rock Financial, which is turned into Quicken Loans, which is going back to Rock Financial. That started my mortgage career. I was a loan officer for a couple of years, but it wasn't a good fit for my personality. I’ll be honest with you. I had a little bit of fear of noes and I couldn't get over it the first couple of years as a young guy. I switched to ops, which I had a lot better acumen for. I got my first job in underwriting in ‘98 with a company called PMI Mortgage Insurance Company.
PMI goes way back and they are literally our first sponsor, I believe, that we had on the show. They reached out to me and said, “e love your show. Could we be a sponsor?” I go, “Yeah.” I have an affinity for them and so many great people. Ralph Armenta and so many of the folks there are good.
It’s a teaching system. That's why I appreciate something I picked up and still continue to this day. They didn't throw you in the pit. They were like, “Here's how you do things. Take a class and a test.” They were always educating. It was a fantastic start for my underwriting career.
It was a great company, still some great people in the industry like yourself. Let's talk about, as a 20-year underwriter, what is your definition of a verified approval. We're talking a lot about pre-approvals, but what is a verified approval and how is it different than a pre-qual?
This is a marketing thing when you're a consumer and it sounds the same on your side of the fence, like pre-qual and verified approval. As an underwriter, I advocate more to let an underwriter or ops person that is educated in the guidelines and the rules and knows the calculations. Let them take a look at the borrower before we put them out there shopping with a pre-qual letter. I can tell you the political damage you do to your company by passing out bad pre-qual letters. You're not going to make up for it. You can't outdo a bad reputation.
If you can, at all possible, I lean toward verified approvals, not pre-quals, using systems like Lender Toolkit or Blueprint, which is a systematic way of calculating income. That's the difference. Instead of quitting your thumb in the air and say, “I think you make $5,000 a month and you said you have a car payment, good to go. Go buy that $300,000 house.” Let's do a little more research. Let's make sure that people walking around with our letter realtors and other people in the area don't start seeing our name on that letterhead and turn it down flat out. That's by verifying some more information instead of taking the borrower's word for it.
That gets into an opportunity to tell a little bit about Blueprint. You have a company Blueprint. Tell us a little bit about that and how this fits.
The reason we named the company is that if you go get a House bill, I’m not going to go out there and plum up your drywall and put plumbing in or anything like that. We can draw a sketch and people can fill it in and do the work. You say what you want and we design it. Blueprint, why we name the company that we're working on educating and building tools. The thing that we're most known for is income expert. It's like TurboTax for the mortgage industry. We took a complicated thing which is 36 kinds of incomes are listed in the guidelines. That doesn't even include things like lottery winnings. What do you do if somebody wins the lottery?
There's no guideline about that, but there are things you can do to qualify it. We took that and built a software program that uses the same kind of method as TurboTax. It asks you some questions, you feed us some data, and it calculates the income. It doesn't average things and give you sixteen choices. It will do all the things that, David, you and I know what to do, like trending analysis, checking for a history, validating and you got liquidity on those K1s. It does all those steps that an underwriter does, and then at the end, it prints out how much your borrower makes and gives you the supporting documentation.
It’s like TurboTax says, “Here's what you owe the IRS or what you're getting back and here's all supporting documentation.” We do that in a very clear, easy role fashion. We do 40,000 to 50,000 loans per month on average. It's a little slower right now in the industry, but we're still up in the tens of thousands per month. We've been in business for a couple of years. We have large national lenders. We have one of the agencies that uses us, loan officers, brokers, auditing companies, and all kinds. It's a very diverse tool that's easy to use for anybody from a starting loan officer to an experienced process underwriter.
Brent, it’s good to have you on the show. I love what you and Brett have built there at Lending Toolkit. What a dynamic duo the two of you are. I love it. Be sure to say hi to Brett for me. We got to get him back on the show as well. Brett, as a sales leader who has navigated some market environments like these, as challenging as they are, what kind of edge do you see that a verified approval is giving sales teams now?
When any market cools for salespeople, as sales leaders, we have to be mindful of the sales team’s confidence. The top producers know what to do, especially the ones that have been through it. They buckle down, find their angles, work their database, and hone their processes. Those middle and lower producers are at risk of a confidence crisis, frankly. They begin to lose trust in their ability and it becomes this cascading effect where the lack of volume, the lack of opportunity, and the lack of confidence creates this cascading effective negative implication. The good news is there's something we can do about it.
[bctt tweet="As sales leaders, we have to be mindful of the sales team’s confidence." via="no"]
This is what we're seeing from the lenders we work with and the surveys that we've put out into the market. Re-imagining your underwriting workflow and being able to confidently and quickly deliver lending decisions gives loan officers a legitimate edge and reinvigorates that sales confidence. The only other thing I’d say on that is if you do adopt any of the technology to provide that edge, don't assume the sales teams will know exactly what to do with it. We invite sales leaders to script it out for them. What are you going to do? What are you going to say to realtors? You've got this edge, you've got this new functionality and this new tool. What are you going to say to realtors? How are you going to pitch that?
If you look at some of the biggest lenders out there in the market, I’m thinking of Better, I’m thinking of Rocket, Michael's old employer. It became Rocket, as everyone knows, are you using the term verified approval, Brent? In your underwriting automation space, which you guys are involved in, what do you think they're doing differently?
I’ll reiterate what Michael said and some of it is a marketing tactic. There are caveats. In their marketing material, they've got stipulations and a verified approval letter, for which they even got an acronym. This was an article I read that was put out three days ago. They're very clearly pursuing this concept as a sales tactic and they do have caveats in there. For example, their verified approval letter program doesn't accommodate self-employed borrowers, but the industry, in general, is definitely moving to a self-service underwriting model. Mortgage is not as cut and dry as, say, getting an auto loan or something like that. We're always going to have underwriters.
I think that's a good point to bring out. A lot of people read this and they all anticipate. Isn't this going to get fairly binary at some point in time when underwriters are not needed? The answer is clearly no. Underwriters are needed, but it's directing underwriters to the more complicated transactions which Michael talked about it a little earlier. I think that's such an important part of it.
It also frees up underwriting resources with sales. Finding those gems or a program that's more conducive to profitability and things like that and giving underwriters space to get their DE and that type of thing because they're not spending their time on clerical activities. This is a great time for underwriters and the ones that embrace the new paradigm. To answer your question specifically, the big box lenders are leveraging data against rules engines, sophisticated algorithms, calculation models that allow lenders to move underwriting towards the point of sale. Let me give you an example.
Verified Approval: The big box lenders are leveraging data against rules engines, sophisticated algorithms, and calculation models, allowing lenders to move underwriting toward the point of sale.
If you use a service like a work number through AUS and get day one certainty, our Lender Toolkit’s AI underwriter can generate a doc expiration date using the data coming over through our AUS integration and generate that condition so the downstream user is aware and things like that. Alternatively, you can couple our AI underwriter with the data generated from Blueprint and then present those to the lender.
That's why we're very excited about the technology partnership we have with Blueprint. I think that's what they're focused on. If you think about the industry and the investment in technology five years ago, it was a point of sale. That was called digital mortgage. Point of sale definitely improved the industry but it didn't solve the most important challenge in the industry. That's the manufacturing process. That's where everybody's at right now.
Everyone is focused and driving cost town. Michael, when you're speaking of data, income seems to be the keystone data for this particular idea of verified approval. I can imagine income considerations like calculation of consistency and accurate trending analysis are essential. Can you provide some color for our audience? What are some lenders doing wrong in this area?
As an underwriter, this is not a get rid of underwriter. It's focus them on the loans that need focusing on. We don't need to worry about the salary with the 32 LTV range or refi with an 800 credit score. We got to work on the self-employed people. David, you're an underwriter. I spent a couple of years as an auditing manager. I’m part of your underwriting query. You generally float over to auditing. It's a great teaching tool. When you're looking at two things that every time the underwriter does income analysis, is the data solid and is your calculation method solid? If you've got fraudulent pay stubs, it doesn't matter how good your calculations are and if you've got great pay stubs, it doesn't matter if you don't know how to do the calculations. That's why Blueprint is taken off like crazy.
Some of our customers tell us we have reduced the number of overall errors in the company tenfold because of the four C’s, Credit, Capacity, debt and income, Collateral and Cash. It's the capacity that gets us. We don't have trouble with bank statements. Appraisals are getting a lot better. That used to be the number two. You could argue it was number one, but still, to this day, you have a borrower with a job, a side business doing Uber, a couple of rental properties and a spouse working two part-time jobs. You got to do a little work. You got to have sound underwriting practices.
That's what our software does. It creates that calculation consistency. Quick story, I got a client down in Florida. He’s a great guy and he's on his game. He’s a great loan officer. What I loved about him is he will pre-call somebody over the weekend and he's been a long-time client. He’s got my cell phone and he calls me. He’s like, “I got this problem. It was somebody that switched jobs or got a promotion or something like that.” He did not want to put his approval letter out until he sent it to me.
He put it in Blueprint and he said, “How come Blueprint is saying don't use the income?” It’s because we were flagging declining income. It was 18% down on base pay. That's not normal. You're supposed to make $4,000 a month. Why is it calculating the $3,100? There's a problem. It doesn't mean we can't use it. We need to address it before we go get in that verified approval. He told the borrower the weekend, “I’m working on it. I don't want to give you this letter with my name on it saying you're good to your realtor went and I don't know.” We worked it out and we found out they got a pay raise. They were promoted and this is all legit.
We got a VOE and said a pay stub from the weekend. We looked at it. I gave them some advice and he put it back in the calculator. We had a trending analysis that showed an increased income. We wrote our narration. We gave our explanation, put it in there and they moved on with a good solid approval. I don't want to broad brush this, but this is where, and I can say this because I was a loan officer for a couple of years, sometimes the green glasses get you where you're like, “I want to make sure I get this sale.” The problem is if you keep risking that, your aggressiveness of the sale is going to give you a bad reputation.
What we want to do is make sure that we're not sending this borrower a false hope. After many years in business and you guys can probably say the same thing, I can't sell a loan when I go to parties. I’m not a loan officer. I couldn't give you a loan if I wanted to. I don't even know what the rates are. People are like, “What are the rates?” I was like, “I don't know. Look it up.” I hear horror story after horror story. I was like, “What happened?” “I got this loan.” “How long does it take you to close?” “Three months.” For anybody who has been in the industry, if it takes you three months to close, something went wrong.
[bctt tweet="Your aggressiveness in the sale is going to give you a bad reputation. We want to make sure that we're not sending this borrower false hope. " username=""]
More than likely, you weren't pre-qualified properly or you weren't sending a verified approval letter. You got this nice letter, you put an offer down, you told your friends, families, co-workers about this new house and it didn't go through. Guess what's going to happen? They're going to drag your company's name because if I’m that person, I’m not saying my credit and DTI were bad.
They’re like, “That's stupid. That Lender Toolkit. I have an 800 FICO score. They wouldn't take my income. That’s ridiculous. Don't go to them. They suck.” That's what happens. Our companies get trashed, not even individual loan officers. We got to slow down a little bit and make sure we're not sending people false hope. That's a passion of mine. It's a nightmare when loans, especially purchase loans, start cascadingly go bad. It hurts a lot of families.
Not only it hurts families, but it hurts our industry. How many borrowers go back to the same lender? Very rare. It's largely on this point they had such a bad experience and a lot of it is because it wasn't pre-qualified. It's how we start everything. You're a pilot, Michael, then it's that checklist. If you own an airplane, you go into the airplane and you're familiar with that airplane, but what's the thing you pull out regardless of how many hours you've got in that plane?
Every time I start that airplane. It's only 8 or 9 switches. If you go through it, check the lights and this. I was telling you earlier when we were talking, I’m flying along one day at a couple of thousand feet, wondering why the plane is not going as fast as it should. Nothing dangerous where it's like, “I’m doing 110, I should be doing 140.” I look out the wing and there are my flaps extended. I totally missed the cruise checklist because I was so enjoying the view, probably because I love flying. It's easy to do even when you've done it 100 or 200 times. I love what you said about the checklist. How many loan officers don't create a checklist?
Once you get the client to say yes, how do you smoothly let them go through? What technology are you using? What's your email is supposed to say? What are your touchpoints? When is your communication? Do they have your cell phone? There are a lot of things even outside of what we're talking about. I feel like they're shooting from the hip. It's not fun when you're buying a $300,00 or $400,000 property and it feels like the person helping you is shooting from the hip.
It's the most important transaction in anyone's life. That moment and transaction is the most important one. It's those principles that we can bring to our industry. I’m getting my private license again. I’m looking forward to getting back up in the sky and I’ve realized the importance of that checklist. My CFI, Certified Flight Instructor, is telling me, David, we're going to go through that checklist. You're going to have it memorized, but you will get out of ever using it. Don't ever get that confident. Brent, let's get over to you. I want to make sure that we talk about the transformation of underwriting. Lenders must evolve and then it's the right time to do so. With the market as it is now, there is a lot of palatable fear out there. If you listen to the last major board, the company closed its doors. How are you seeing lenders handle this kind of conflict, Brent?
That's the million-dollar question, David. This is the right time for the transformation of your underwriting process. We have a disclosure automation product, which is terrific. This is a great time to transform that part of your business. You have the space to be able to do that. Again, the market is where it's at. The interesting thing I’ve noticed over the last probably four months is that the larger the lender, the more inclined they are to make the investment.
Verified Approval: Over the last four months, the larger the lender, the more inclined they are to make the investment.
I think that tells you something. What that tells you is the larger lender is able to look out. They're not fighting today's fires. They're fighting today's fires and have those challenges, but they're looking out to 3, 4, 5 years and saying, “What does my business look like two years from now? What does my business look like five years from now?”
What their business looks like even right at the point of sale. In the point-of-sale system, the borrower can self-serve certain borrower combinations. In the POS, if you press the button, you get your disclosures and approval immediately and can go shopping confidently. Being able to see that vision and understand that there are technology vendors like Lender Toolkit with our AI underwriter and disclosure automation and Blueprint with their income automation, that's possible. We can do these things. They see that vision. They're executing that vision and moving forward with us collectively.
The challenge for the middle-tier lenders is taking that leap and saying, with strong leadership, “We're going to make these investments in the technology.” It's more than making an investment in technology. It's having a very clear vision and communicating that vision to the field. As we all know, oftentimes, these solutions start with sales and rightly so in many respects. Ultimately, we want to drive down the cost of operations and have a more balanced approach there.
Being able to give the loan officer an edge early on with the income analysis and the automated conditioning that AI underwriter provides allows you to have that immediate lift for the sales field, get them reinvigorated, excited about getting out there and making the realtor calls and then over time, transforming the entire underwriting workflow so that you are eventually able to press the button and get disclosures and approval at the press of a button. Seeing the vision and then executing the vision is how successful lenders are navigating these waters.
[bctt tweet="Seeing the vision and then executing the vision is really how successful lenders are navigating these waters. " username=""]
You bring up an important point. It's the cost originate. We received the latest data from Q1 of 2022. The cost originate a single loan right now is $10,637 up from the previous quarter of $9,470, up from the previous quarter of $9,100. It continues to keep climbing. Michael, are we going to see this truly bring out cost savings or is this going to be one of those things where we get some other benefit, but it's not going to bring the cost savings?
That's a great thing. I’m not a salesperson by trade. I do most of the sales of the company, but I’m not a salesperson. I’m an underwriter and an ops person. I look at it. If you show my company how I can give you $1 and you can save me $3, I have no reason not to do it unless it degrades quality or something. Pretty much what you were saying earlier is the weird thing. From 1997 to ‘98, I’m working at Inter First. I’m a new underwriter. I’m doing AA minus programs. If you're old school like me and Dave, you know what minus programs are.
They're automated with LP, but you got to do little extra work because they're not the greatest borrowers. I was doing it 3 or 4 a day. This is when people would slap down a file on my desk with the two-hole punch. I would look through it with my little thumb thing on and look at pay stubs, make notes on it, flip it down, write my conditions, type in the computer, send it off and it would all stay in paper form.
Do you know what underwriters are doing now? We did a survey in 2021. Their client is 3 to 4 a day. How is that possible? An underwriter is like, “Listen to me. We're not trying to get rid of our job, but here's the stuff you're going to miss. You won't get to look at those flood certs and look at taxes all day. You're not going to get to look at your credit report expiration date or look through for a state disclosure for 1,000 times.” That's all you're missing. These systems do that grunt work and let you focus on your risk analysis. I don't want to pay you for math. I want to pay you for risk analysis. That's weird. We're doing a loan for Mike Whitbeck. He works at Mike's airplanes and he says he is not self-employed.
Funny his address and work address is in the same location. That's what I want you to look for. Not as 2 plus 2 equals 4. If you put 2 plus 2 equals 5, I’m going to assume you made a mistake and not that you don't know that. We need to get more efficient. I’m going to pick on our industry. Underwriters are one of the most expensive ops people there are. By far, underwriters generally make more than closers. Our processors and managers are expensive. Underwriters, we got to do better. We got to get through more files without degrading quality. We need to help out and row the boat here because we get laid off when things get slow.
How are the two of you working together? Brent invited you, Michael, to come onto the show. There's something exciting about what you two are doing. Talk a little bit about that.
I also want to touch on the profitability topic to stay on that line of discussion. I was recently talking to one of our customers out in Michigan. They do about 1,000 loans a month and I was talking to them about some of the value they get from having an underwriting automation solution. When you think about having the computer versus a person doing the underwriting on things like the credit report, for example, you're going to get consistent underwrite every single time because the computer is doing it.
By the way, David, we are speaking of man versus computer. We did a side-by-side comparison for a very large lender down in Texas and the computer, with very little training and I was shocked by this, was almost perfect on a pretty straightforward file. Obviously, it's got to be configured for some of the bond programs, jumbo, and things like that. The point is that without much training, the computer was almost perfect against the human, which was pretty exciting. That's across income assets, reading AUS, looking at appraisal, FHA and all those things. Getting back to the profitability, the lender I was talking to, I was talking to the CEO, and he said, “By having an automated underwriting solution in place and having a standard underwrite, it does it the same way every single time and we know it's accurate.”
They were able to move from a 13 to 14-day average commitment period to a 3-day commitment period on delivery on the backend. That's real money on the backend. They're saving basis points on the backend because they're using the underwriting solution. When we're evaluating technology, the emphasis is, a lot of times, how is this going to help my salespeople?
Let's look at profitability. How is this going to help the company? There are a lot of ways we can pick up profitability along the manufacturing line. I wanted to bring that up because not only did they save commitment period days but they were also able to virtually eliminate their post-closing department because, again, the computer is doing the underwrite. In terms of our relationship with Blueprint, we're very excited. We view Blueprint as the best-in-breed for income analysis and automation. We're doing a deep technology integration with them. We'll be able to take their guidelines, consume those guidelines, and then automatically condition from that. It's going to be a terrific lights-out solution, and I think the industry is going to love it.
That is encouraging. Michael, what are your thoughts on this integration?
It's the same exact thing. It's about efficiency. Since I live outside Detroit, I got to use a car analogy because I like how Brent says the manufacturing process. When I train underwriters, I use a ten-point underwriting system. I broke down how to go through a file in ten uniform steps and I always teach them, “if you follow these steps, you're going to reduce your error rate.” When we're building cars in Detroit, we don't one day start with a frame. The next day, start with a hood. They build a car the same way every time. I think cars are built 6 to 8 hours from scratch to out the door. This is because they perfected it. They do things the same way, analyze it and continually study a better way to do them. If you're doing it willy-nilly every time, there's no way you can improve.
You haven't started at the process, don't have a checklist, and don't have any kind of things. As an ops manager and Brent on the sales side, I’m with him as an ops manager. My job isn't to sit there and put up fires all day. My job is to analyze what's happening, how I put these fires out, and how I stop them from restarting. I used to have underwriting managers work for me. I’m like, “You keep coming at the same problem. Why is this keep happening? What's your solution?” Instead of people being mad on my phone about loans all the time and me putting the PC touch on it, how do we stop this from happening?
Can we add it to a checklist? Can we put a condition in place? Can we put a second review thing in place? Can we add automation? Every time you do this stuff, you get faster locks, less people that you need to touch the file, and you get them through quicker. I was a loan officer. If I get a short lock under 15-day lock risk versus 30, that saves my customer money. You are always fearful to do that because for 15 days, even in the world nowadays, you can't pull something that off. That's where it works. You can't risk that stuff. That's the crazy thing about it.
This is exciting information. How can our audience learn more? Should they be contacting both of you? Brent, Michael, how does this work? How can people learn more?
The best approach is to send an email to Sales@LenderToolkit.com. From there, Michael and I will have a joint conversation with the lender and talk through our respective solutions. Sales@LenderToolkit.com will reach right out and schedule a time for Michael and I to have a comprehensive conversation. We're happy to meet with lenders and talk underwriting and efficiency, profitability, sales, or whatever the topic it would be.
Michael, for those that are reading and want to write it down, what's your website?
It's www.GetBlueprint.io. The dot io is a tech thing. Ones and zeros are on and off on computers. The tech guys love the io. I want the dot-com, but we are a tech environment. It's one of the newer domains. Generally, if you email, that's what messes you up. As Brent said, if you go on there, our contact is on there. I’m going to point you toward the Lender Toolkit because the unified solution we're building together is probably more of what we're talking about here. We have a great solution, obviously, but if you're looking for the overall, I would definitely look at the combined solution. I jokingly say I’m an engine builder. If you want a car, I don't sell cars. I build dang good engines and Lender Toolkit builds a heck of a good car. We got our cool engine going inside of it, so we want to take advantage of that.
It's appropriate coming from Detroit. That's perfect, Michael. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Great information. I encourage our audience to reach out, and share this with your ops people, the chief operating officer and the head of underwriting. This is the kind of show that you can make such a difference for yourself. Are you going to go out with one of those flimsy pre-qualifications? Are you going to go out with a verified approval? I encourage you to do the latter. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Brent, Michael, I appreciate you both being here.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks, David.
---
That was an interesting amount of information given in that episode. I encourage, again, everyone reading, share this. Folks, we're going to say thank you for taking the time to tune in. Share this show with others. We appreciate you very much and hope you have a great rest of your week. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsors, Finastra, FormFree, Lender Toolkit, Snapdocs, Total Expert, SimpleNexus, the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, Lenders One, the Mortgage Collaborative, SuccessKit, Knowledge Coop, Mobility MMI, Modex, Mortgage Advisory Tools and DW Consulting. There’s so much we have in the way of tremendous sponsors and products. Check them all out. I appreciate you all. Listen to last week's episode that Jack and I did together. Also, listen to the other episodes. We recorded one of the David Stevens that you're going to enjoy tuning into. We also released one last week with Ron Thunberg. Lots of content is going up on our website. I encourage you to check it and be sure to check it on iTunes if you have an iPhone and then search it elsewhere. We'll be up on the Google Play Store very soon. Also, if you Google Lykken on Lending, you'll find us all over many of the platforms out there. Have a great week. I look forward to having you back here next week everybody.
