HouseCanary

Customers don’t spend much time engaging positively with their loan servicers. Let’s change that. With ComeHome powered by HouseCanary, you can build your brand and generate customer loyalty with superior consumer-facing real estate tools and timely, immersive, and action-oriented email marketing. As a real estate brokerage with broad coverage and advanced analytical tools, HouseCanary can help you turn your mortgage servicing rights (MSR) portfolio from a collection of anonymous financial assets into a wellspring of high-value relationships with lifelong customers.

Be your servicing customers’ first call for new home financing 

The homeowner experience in HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform helps servicers and depositories get the first opportunity for customers’ future loan needs, whether that’s their next refinance, home equity loan, or purchase. When you invite customers into HouseCanary’s co-branded home management dashboard via your servicing portal, they will keep coming back for opportunities to engage with the most important investments in their lives.

Empower homeowners with tools driven by our industry-leading AVM

Customers will explore for themselves how they can save money or release cash with a refinance. We’ll also show them live updated neighborhood real estate activity. Homeowners will be delighted to use enterprise-quality valuation tools, built on our automated valuation model (AVM), that calculate cost and return on investment of home improvements. Inspire your customers to plan their dream remodeling and finance it directly with your home equity product. We’ll also show your customers how to save money on property taxes and utility costs with tax, solar, and, where available, utility switch calculators.

Earn your place as preferred lender for customers’ next home purchases

When your customers are ready to search for their next homes, ComeHome’s experience for home buyers provides them with unmatched home search tools to explore listings, market data, and analytics from HouseCanary. Stay with your customers through every step of their home buying process, and be the clear choice of mortgage provider when it’s time to close — with instant mortgage on preapproved homes.

Build customer relationships with emails they’ll be eager to read

When your customers sign up for co-branded ComeHome updates from HouseCanary, we’ll send timely market and property news that keeps them engaged with their equity and your brand. Our catchy email content will keep customers coming back to your site, while also pushing events to your CRM system to track engagement. In partnership with ComeHome, you can turn MSRs into loyal customers. Transform financial assets worth hundreds of dollars in volatile cash flows into human relationships worth tens of thousands of dollars of stable lifetime value.

Provide instant certainty with actionable valuations from HouseCanary

HouseCanary’s highly accurate, data-driven home value reports are uniquely suited to powering transactions directly off of the servicing book. Given the recent update of the de minimis threshold for evaluations from $250,000 to $400,000 and Fitch Ratings’ report supporting use of a HouseCanary AVM for origination of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and other second lien products for securitization, customers can transact instantly based on the value they track in our ComeHome web experience.

Partner with us and lead the industry with next-generation loan servicing

Only HouseCanary combines the property technology DNA of an industry-leading valuation-focused brokerage with the beautifully designed, fast rendering, and mobile-optimized user experience built with a consumer-first mindset. By incorporating ComeHome into your digital ecosystem, you can provide the best-in-class experience that keeps customers engaged with your brand. 

Interested in learning more about ComeHome?

HouseCanary Inc. today launched ComeHome, a proprietary platform built for mortgage lenders to attract, retain and convert customers into their suite of loan products. ComeHome creates a seamless experience that puts lenders directly in front of prospective buyers at the beginning of their home search and establishes a productive, ongoing relationship with homeowner customers around their largest asset.

ComeHome is a co-branded mobile and desktop experience that offers an integrated digital home shopping and homeowner experience embedded into mortgage lenders’ existing digital properties – both websites and native mobile apps.

“Lenders are seeking deeper relationships with their customers,” said Jeremy Sicklick, HouseCanary’s founder and CEO. “ComeHome allows lenders to quickly and easily offer powerful online home-search and homeowner capabilities in their own environment. There is no need for the lender’s customer to visit multiple websites; they never leave your environment, you retain them all the way through the process.”

For home buyers, ComeHome integrates fully featured property search tools straight into the lender’s existing digital products by coupling property search with loan products for an integrated experience from search through loan transaction. The lender is joining the customer in their home buying journey at the very beginning of the home search process, instead of buying their way in at the end when it could be too late, too competitive, and too expensive.

ComeHome for homeowners opens up more opportunities for lenders to engage more frequently with their existing customers. It allows current customers, both mortgage and depository, to understand and responsibly manage their most valuable asset – their home – and take advantage of any offers around first mortgage, refinance, and home equity line of credit (HELOC) opportunities, right in the lender’s ecosystem.

Crucially, the value that drives ComeHome’s search, home equity, and home improvement functionality ties to the same algorithms that drive its cutting-edge qualified evaluations. For a growing subset of loans, customers will have near-instant closing certainty for purchases, refinances, and home equity products.

Tying the experience together is ComeHome’s messaging and alerting API, which allows the lender to stay in contact with their customers around property-specific alerts and market changes on an ongoing basis via email and mobile push alerts.

In preparation for the launch, HouseCanary subjected the ComeHome platform to numerous third-party onboarding and security audits, which passed the rigorous testing required by systemically important financial institutions. HouseCanary is Soc 2 Type I and Type II certified, and all customer-facing experiences are ADA accessibility-compliant.

To see more, please visit:  https://www.housecanary.com/comehome.

For more information, contact  [email protected].

About HouseCanary:

Founded in 2013, HouseCanary is a real estate technology company providing the most accurate home valuations to drive smarter decisions across the real estate ecosystem. Clients include leading institutional investors and lenders who trust HouseCanary’s products to fuel acquisition, portfolio management, underwriting, and other processes. HouseCanary can be found at  www.housecanary.com

Contacts:

Denise Dunckel
VP Communications, HouseCanary
[email protected]

Stephanie Polak
SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT | HouseCanary

Fitch is helping securities issuers unlock the power of modern AVMs (automated valuation models). Fitch Ratings Inc. released a special report on September 27, 2019 updating residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) criteria and disclosing their analysis of automated residential real estate valuations from multiple vendors. Fitch is a leading provider of credit ratings and research. The report, AVMs Can Play a Helpful Role in U.S. RMBS (paywall), lays out the risks and opportunities of using AVMs as alternatives to traditional valuation methods for second liens or seasoned performing loans and as a secondary value check for originations with full appraisal. Fitch’s description of how issuers can use AVMs in securitizations opens the doors for securities issuers to leverage advances in data-driven valuation products.

In an unprecedented move, the report includes the level of discount, or “haircut,” Fitch will assess in determining property valuation for reviewed vendors’ AVMs when used as primary valuations. Fitch also reports that they will accept reviewed vendors’ high-confidence AVMs as secondary valuations in due diligence, provided they are within 10% of a previously conducted appraisal. 

By revealing this information about their risk assessment process, Fitch grants issuers and bond investors greater certainty. “Lenders use AVMs because they offer a fast, affordable, statistically derived estimate of a property’s value. Also, AVMs can provide more objectivity and are less susceptible to pressures to provide a specific value than appraisals performed by human appraisers, which could contain bias,” says Fitch. 

Fitch determines their discount based on forecast standard deviation (FSD), a standard measure of confidence that HouseCanary routinely surfaces in our AVM tools. Fitch mapped each vendor’s internal measure of FSD to their accepted thresholds for each level of valuation haircut. Issuers can now combine this map with vendors’ hit rates at each FSD to determine the theoretical haircut Fitch will apply to values.

The Fitch report did not include information about the hit rate of each vendor. This is key information that issuers will need in order to understand the overall haircut and rating impact of their AVM choice. An AVM provider can easily increase its perception of accuracy by throttling hit rate and only submitting AVMs for data-rich properties in liquid, homogenous neighborhoods. Choosing an AVM that maximizes the coverage of your portfolio in each high-confidence band minimizes the haircut applied to the portfolio. It is therefore critical to ask your AVM vendors for their FSD levels on a given portfolio to fully utilize Fitch’s report. 

HouseCanary, for instance, has been shown by independent third party results to have among the highest hit rates of any AVM vendor. For additional context, we’ve broken down our confidence metrics based on our current hit rate for a representative nationwide sample of sold properties:

Users of a HouseCanary AVM product will see the minimum haircut (2.5%) on nearly half of a pool’s assets, resulting in a lower overall haircut compared to assets valued by non-reviewed vendors or AVMs with lower hit rates. 

Based on performance testing of the HouseCanary AVM hit rate as of publication, 98% of all transacted properties that HouseCanary values would fall within Fitch’s 80% confidence threshold, meriting smaller haircuts. To illustrate what this means for lenders or investors valuing a portfolio of properties or liens, let’s look at an example of how an investor could use the HouseCanary AVM as the primary valuation for seasoned performing or second liens. The chart below shows the haircuts outlined by Fitch that would be applied to each FSD, or confidence level, threshold and the respective percentage of properties that would fall within each band in an unbiased, national level portfolio:

As of October 2019, 46% of HouseCanary AVMs typically fall within the ≤0.05 FSD band for an unbiased, national level portfolio of transacted properties. In a hypothetical $100 million portfolio consisting of 1,000 homes valued at $100,000 each, the total notional value of those homes would be $46 million. As we are a reviewed vendor, the haircut Fitch would apply to that portion of properties is 2.5%, resulting in a value of $44.9 million. The subsequent band of 90% confidence would be 38% (84%–46%) of the portfolio, or $38 million, which would receive a 5% haircut and result in a total notional value of $36.1 million. The discounting schema can be applied down the table for each threshold level. As shown, the overall, effective portfolio discount comes to 4.85%, resulting in a final post-haircut notional value of $95.2 million versus the $100 million initial valuation. 

The HouseCanary AVM that Fitch reviewed so favorably is the same engine driving our onsite valuation products. Agile Evaluation is designed to fulfill the Interagency Guidelines (IAG) requirements for a qualified evaluation. According to the IAG, an evaluation must include a value conclusion and assessment of the actual physical condition of the property being evaluated. By providing a value conclusion informed by a physical inspection, Agile Evaluation aligns with these requirements. With Agile Evaluation, lenders get an evaluation report at a significant cost savings compared to a BPO or traditional evaluation, delivered in just a few days. 

We have also paired the HouseCanary AVM with a third-party insurance partner to offer Agile Certified products. Agile Evaluation Certified is an evaluation designed to comply with IAG regulations, plus this product provides risk transfer coverage to the lender. Lenders can use Agile Evaluation Certified to expand their usage of evaluations within their existing risk guidelines. 

HouseCanary’s hit rate continues to improve as we increase our brokerage coverage and analytics capabilities. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay posted on HouseCanary news and industry insights.

Jeremy Sicklick @JeremySicklick
CEO & CO-FOUNDER | HouseCanary

HouseCanary CEO weighs in on the latest Wall Street Journal article

Have you read the news about federal regulation for property valuations? Appraisal requirements are likely to get a long-awaited update. The Wall Street Journal reached out to talk to me about the changes and discuss HouseCanary’s role in the future of property valuation. 

The change in the works is an update to the de minimis appraisal threshold for residential real estate, which is the size at which a residential property loan requires a full appraisal by a licensed appraiser. 

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) have now approved raising the de minimis to $400,000. Once the Federal Reserve passes this rule, the change will go into effect in January 2020, enabling a majority of the housing stock in the United States to become eligible for technology-based property valuations. In an industry that’s already facing a shortage of licensed appraisers, this is good news across the board for real estate buyers, sellers, and investors who want to work faster and reduce friction.

HouseCanary’s Agile Evaluation is a condition-informed evaluation that helps lenders cut valuation costs dramatically on transactions below the de minimis. Agile Evaluation is faster and more convenient than an appraisal, at a lower price. We’ve designed this product to comply with the Interagency Guidelines (IAG) requirements for use in real estate transactions below the de minimis threshold. When used in accordance with IAG guidance, Agile Evaluation can be Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) compliant. Agile Evaluation also has applications for loan renewals, refinances, and non-conforming originations. 

I showed WSJ journalist Ryan Dezember what an Agile Evaluation report looks like, and told him that the only human element is the person who takes the inspection photos. Everything else is software. Agile Evaluation is a leap forward from an appraisal. This product provides deeper context than an appraisal, and additional risk information. Our cutting-edge system determines a property’s fair market value by incorporating inspection data into our proprietary valuation technology, and removes much of the  risk that may arise due to human valuation bias. We deliver standard Agile Evaluations with exterior inspection in four business days, whereas the average appraisal can take three weeks.