Residential Briefs

MBA (10/7/2008 ) Palaparty, Vijay
OpenClose Expands Decision Assist
OpenClose, West Palm Beach, Fla., developers of web-based mortgage lending software, expanded its loan pricing engine and product suite, Decision Assist. The enhancement turns the pricing engine into four products targeted to mortgage professionals.

Decision Assist Broker is designed for individual users; Express targets small groups; Professional is available for mid-sized companies; and Enterprise meets decisioning needs of large companies. The Decision Assist product suite enables mortgage originators to identify the appropriate loan product for a borrower, speed funding and increase profit. With four products, the suite also allows Decision Assist to grow with loan volume.

Wingspan Portfolio Advisors Launches Servicing Business
Wingspan Portfolio Advisors LLC, Carrollton, Texas, a mortgage servicing company, launched to assist lenders and servicers who have seriously delinquent loans. The company, which applies a borrower-focused servicing methodology, seeks to mitigate losses and help borrowers achieve full payment status.

MortgageCadence Engages Law Firm for Legal Support, Guidance
Mortgage Cadence Inc., Denver, a provider of enterprising lending technology for the financial services industry, engaged Weiner Brodsky Sidman Kider PC, Washington, D.C., to provide insight and analysis on federal and state compliance and regulatory matters. The relationship strengthens Mortgage Cadence’s Finale, which offers technology for forward and reverse mortgage lending.

1st Metropolitan Mortgage Introduces BrightGreen Mortgage Program
1st Metropolitan Mortgage, Charlotte, N.C., a national mortgage originator, introduced its national BrightGreen Mortgage program. The program will give originators tools and support to produce mortgages in a more environmentally-friendly manner while aiming to save borrowers time and money. Participating branches nationwide will operate in greener, sustainable efforts.

Optimal Blue, AllRegs Announce Integrated Technology
Optimal Blue, Plano, Texas, developer of a web-based platform that couples decisioning technology with content management for the mortgage industry, has combined resources with AllRegs, Eagan, Minn., provider of information for the mortgage industry to provide integrated technology for loan officers.

Optimal Blue’s users of its product eligibility and pricing engine can access AllRegs LoanLibrary product, which features 2,600 products and 60 investors. Optimal Blue maintains, updates and delivers current mortgage product content accessed by its customers through its automated secondary marketing platform.

First Houston Changes Name to Envoy Mortgage
First Houston Mortgage, Houston, a mortgage-banking firm licensed in 20 states, changed its corporate name to Envoy Mortgage. As part of the company’s effort to rebrand itself from a regional company to a national lending organization, First Houston Mortgage’s leadership felt a name change would more appropriately reflect this corporate expansion.

RamQuest Announces Complete Closing Version 6.1.1
RamQuest Software Inc., Plano, Texas, developer of the Closing Market digital network, released version 6.1.1 of its technology for title and escrow production, Complete Closing Enterprise. Complete Closing Enterprise is the foundation for RamQuest's product suite and provides title companies with tools to manage the title insurance process including order processing, commitment policy, escrow accounting and HUD-1 generation.

RamQuest added Multiple Bank Account capability for title companies in the latest update. Multiple Bank Accounts gives title companies the ability to associate multiple banks accounts with a file. Complete Closing 6.1.1 also adds additional controls regulating designated access to documents published to the web.

Xenos Releases Enterprise Server
Xenos Group Inc., Toronto, launched Enterprise Server, electronic information infrastructure and management technology. The server provides business information architecture and flow through Streamlining Enterprise Information Supply Chains, eliminating redundancies in information storage in a variety of formats.

The server-based infrastructure technology delivers organizational control over resources for data and document transformation from a central location in the enterprise. Xenos ES consolidates disparate and/or legacy technologies, systems and data located across the enterprise and integrates with existing components of an organization’s information supply chains.

FNC Offers IntelliReal AVM Product
FNC Inc., Oxford, Miss., a technology company for mortgage compliance, entered into alliance with IntelliReal, Lakewood, Colo., adding the automated valuation model provider to its list of value-added services.

IntelliReal’s AVM includes multiple listing service data and coverage provides access to more than 77 million property records nationwide. The IntelliReal AVM will also be available to regional and community banks that use FNC’s Collateral Headquarters platform.

Zillow Publishes Professional Directory
Real estate web site Zillow.com, Seattle, published the Zillow Professional Directory, a free resource for real estate professionals to market their services to Zillow's visitors. The Zillow Professional Directory helps consumers interested in buying, selling or conducting home renovations, to find and connect with a local professional to fit their needs.

The Zillow Professional Directory includes the more than 150,000 real estate professionals who currently have an active profile on Zillow. The Directory is open to any professional who caters to local homeowners, buyers or sellers, including real estate agents, stagers, lenders, contractors, landscapers or architects. Consumers can then search for professionals by specialty, business name, city, zip code or neighborhood.

Andrew Davidson Offers Breakpoint Analysis
Andrew Davidson & Co., New York announced Breakpoint Analysis, a means to assess credit risk of mortgage bonds. AD&Co is a provider of models of borrower behavior and risk analytics for fixed income investors of mortgage- and asset-backed securities, and an advisor in the areas of risk management, valuation of MBS and mortgage derivatives.

Breakpoint Analysis provides an alternative to a credit rating of the asset as an up-to-date measure of credit risk. A Breakpoint Ratio is the ratio of the collateral losses required to cause the first dollar of a bond's principal write-down to the projected loss in the base case economic scenario. A grid of stress scenarios is defined and prepayments, defaults, losses and bond write-downs are generated for each of the scenarios using AD&Co's LoanDynamics Model.