Hometrack Rings in New Era for Mortgage Industry

Delivering a ‘faster time to yes’ in mortgage decisioning for lenders, brokers and borrowers alike, the vision also sets out Hometrack’s strategy to digitise the mortgage journey with automated valuation, property risk and income verification.

A milestone for the industry, the game-changing proposition defines four new product suites, and launches four new products, building upon Hometrack’s market leading credentials with its Automated Valuation Model (AVM), which is currently trusted by 17 of the top 20 UK high street lenders.

This next generation of innovation will not only offer a greater range of lending insights, but will ultimately redefine the mortgage journey for lenders, brokers and borrowers. The product suites are:

• Valuation Solutions: Informing lenders and brokers instantly at origination, or for an entire portfolio, what a property is worth with confidence using data and analytics

• Automation Solutions: Connecting lenders, brokers and Conveyancers across the entire mortgage journey and automating risk decisions and significantly reducing time from application to offer

• Risk Insight: Informing lenders instantly during mortgage origination or for their entire portfolio what property risks exist and what the impact could be on capital valuation, all the while keeping compliant with regulation

• Opportunity Insight: Providing valuable data and greater insight about the property market today and where it’s headed

Laddering up to the product suites, the new products are:

• Digital Valuer, sitting under Valuation Solutions, provides a state-of-the-art digital solution that offers fast, reliable and cost-efficient property valuations, extending Hometrack’s automated valuation capabilities and property risk assessments. It represents the next generation of automated valuation complementing and going beyond the AVM, assessing valuation and risk to a new fidelity benchmark, resulting in significantly less physical valuations, saving cost and time. Digital Valuer integrates seamlessly with Hometrack’s AVM avoiding the need for complex integration.

• Broker AVM, also sitting under Valuation Solutions, ensures a ‘right first time’ product selection specific to brokers and their customers seamlessly within the Broker Platform. Providing a property valuation, monthly rental and property attribute data with confidence bandings, the Broker AVM uses Hometrack’s market leading AVM model to return valuations tailored for brokers without the precise confidence levels that lenders require. The Broker AVM is particularly useful when completing Fact Finds and Mortgage Applications, or quoting or applying for home insurance.

• Credit Risk Hub, sitting under Automation Solutions, automates credit risk decisions, with specific emphasis on instant income and expenditure verification, by combining automated verification of borrower documentation and soon to extend to Open Banking. The solution automatically scans, reviews and verifies key applicant details around income and expenditure, reducing the manual effort to process paperwork that has blighted the industry for decades, fully automating 50% plus of applications and reducing effort by 75% on the rest.  Minimising the time and cost of manual processing, Credit Risk Hub allows lenders and brokers to rapidly and cost effectively assess affordability.

• Climate Change Risk, sitting within Risk Insight, is fuelled by data and insights from Ambiental and Terrafirma on flood, coastal erosion and ground risk, and arms lenders with increased understanding of the impact of climate change on their portfolios and during origination, allowing them to be focused on actively managing their climate change risk aligned to their risk appetite. It also enables them to take greater control of the threat of climate change – an accelerating regulatory issue across lender portfolios.

Spencer Wyer, VP of Product & Technology at Hometrack, said: “Today’s launch marks a new milestone for the millions of mortgage journeys undertaken by lenders, brokers and borrowers each year. Unlocking opportunities for the mortgage industry, it improves Hometrack’s offering to lenders and brokers, enabling them to embrace digital mortgage lending more quickly and easily. The powerful combination of Digital Valuer, Broker AVM, Credit Risk Hub and Climate Change Risk offers instant automated decisions and access to a wealth of data and analysis to significantly reduce the time from application to offer.”

Collectively, the Hometrack product suite provides faster, safer and more cost-effective risk decisions with full agility and control for UK lenders. Technological progress in mortgage lending has in the past been held back by legacy IT systems, but in offering its solutions as both standalone APIs and an extension to its widely installed AVM, Hometrack is today offering a clear path for lenders to benefit from digitisation and decision automation, empowering them to improve the ‘time to yes’ for more customers.

George Robbins, VP Commercial at Hometrack, added: “We’ve seen a huge demand for our trusted, integrated lending solutions from UK lenders, and I’m proud to say that in just seven months our new Climate Change Risk product has already been used widely to assess more than a quarter of UK mortgages.”