Stewart in the Studio

E7: How to Improve Your Title Technology Experience

Marvin Stone: Brent, we really cover everything from lead generation and prequalification to application, processing, and underwriting approval, closing, and funding. Absolutely. From A to Z, we cover everything there, but let’s start off with snapshot.

Brent Cochrane: There’s a lot of data out there across various regions

and we’re looking to take advantage of that by bringing in that data really quick, being able to run it against some rules that we can customize with a specific lender, and really giving them that snapshot of the specific property they’re looking at, right? So you’ve got customizable rules, and we can say, does that rule pass or fail?

Really, it gives the lender something that they can get in their hands, immediate, maybe while they’re on the phone with a borrower and they’re going through their interest in doing, say, a home equity loan, and they can look at those things. Hey, who’s this vested in? Okay, I see it’s vested in a husband and wife.

What open liens do you have on the property? Are your taxes current? Just all those things that kind of drive that discussion on maybe helping, deciding what product is correct for them. A HE Loan or a HELOC or just making sure that they have the right equity or maybe there’s a vesting change that needs to happen.

Just getting all those things identified up front are really going to help a lender move through that transaction more efficiently. So they’re going to know that they can move through it very quickly. Or if there’s some things that they’re going to have to do in order to get that over the finish line they’re just aware of them upfront and can plan for that.

Marvin Stone: And so some lenders are wanting to get a look at, is the property in an LLC, like you were saying, vesting issues, is there anything related to zoning that might be a problem? And one of the things that’s probably most important that’s included in Snapshot is that automated valuation. So you get a snapshot on the equity as well, right out of the gate.

So obviously lenders all run loan origination systems and those come with a, an expectation that we’re going to have integration. So can you talk a little bit about Stewart Integrate and the overall philosophy of Stewart when it comes to both off the shelf and proprietary integrations?

Brent Cochrane: But yeah, for sure, we integrate with all the major LOSs.

We also offer custom integrations. We have several custom integrations that we have with clients that are either using proprietary systems or it’s not one that we’ve worked with before. We can definitely set that up as well as even, as I mentioned for some of my product or my client base, they are very small credit unions.

We also have an ordering portal that they can just pick up. Order directly from if there’s not a need for integration. So we can cover the full gamut of third party LOS integration to custom integration, to providing a UI for them to, order directly from it. If they don’t need an integration.

Marvin Stone: So Chris I know you both use the Stewart Accelerate technology that Stewart has to speed underwriting.

Chris, can you talk about Stewart Accelerate and how it fits in to the title production system?

Chris Richardson: Yeah. So it says there at the top of the page there, Stewart Accelerate’s really. a suite of software and offerings that we have. And the two major ones are here on the screen. So on the left, we have automated title search and really what it does is it integrates with data aggregators in order to essentially automate the search process and pull in whatever type of search is relevant for that product type and bring those documents back instantly.

So essentially removing that process of manually doing that search process or having to engage. Local ground abstractor and so this really speeds up our process and really add some scale because it kicks off automatically in the states where it’s available. So we get the order from the lender and usually within 15 minutes, the search is complete and we can begin our exam process.

So really. allows us to deliver on our scorecards with commitment turnaround times. And then just adding more and more States. I think we’re up to around eight states and we got some of the big ones like California, Florida, and Texas. I know the right side, our underwriting decision engine, and this is really key for our curative group.

Our underwriting decision unit takes in a lot of alternative data sources. In addition to the traditional title data that we would use for title underwriting has a rules engine that evaluates all those data points and derives a decision on whether it’s going to be a fast track or a traditional order, but also allows all that data that was used to provide that decision to our curative team to assist them with clearing items that are on the title commitment and moving that process down quicker as well.

We also have the availability to pass that information to lenders. If they want to know what our upfront underwriting decision was, just like it says on the screen here, that can help them maybe put it down to streamline or a fast track within their workflow or potentially set more aggressive rate locks in situations where they can get better pricing for their customers if they know the deal is going to close quicker.