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Technology is There to Help Borrowers

Last week appraisals were in the news, but not in the way they were five years ago when appraisers were backlogged and appraisals were delayed. Last week Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sent out “policy exceptions” which give companies who sell loans to Freddie and Fannie and who need more time a path to keep delivering 2.6 reports through May 19, 2027. It's a sensible backstop, but the November 2 mandate still stands, and the exception has to be requested and comes with an implementation plan. Lenders are encouraged to use the extra time to prepare well, not to slow down. The news does not directly impact borrowers, but it might change the timing of processing the loan.

On a larger scale, changes to policies, procedures, and technology do matter, as does innovation. Orion, our AEs, and most of our brokers are very focused on changes that help your borrowers. With mortgage innovation concentrated primarily on reducing uncertainty surrounding the borrower, advances in income verification, asset validation, employment data, credit analytics, and automated underwriting have substantially improved lenders’ ability to assess consumer risk with greater speed and precision.

But as these borrower-centric processes have matured, the principal sources of operational friction and transaction risk have increasingly migrated to the collateral side of the mortgage equation: Property valuation, inspection processes, collateral quality assessment, and appraisal-related uncertainty now represent some of the most significant impediments to efficiency, certainty, and scalability. Consequently, future mortgage innovation is likely to focus on creating a more comprehensive, standardized, and continuously updated understanding of the underlying asset securing the loan.

We are evolving from reactive appraisal workflows toward proactive property intelligence. Emerging data standards, expanded access to property-level information, and advances in valuation technology, are creating a collateral ecosystem in which insights about a property can be assembled and validated well before a transaction reaches its final stages. This effectively enhances appraisers and other collateral experts by automating administrative tasks and providing richer datasets that support higher-quality judgment.

Transforming property knowledge from a transaction-specific exercise into a cumulative and interoperable asset that can move seamlessly across real estate, appraisal, servicing, and mortgage platforms will allow the mortgage industry to achieve for collateral what it has largely achieved for borrower data: greater certainty, earlier risk identification, and more informed decision-making throughout the mortgage lifecycle. Orion and our AEs will continue to use the best tools possible to help our broker’s clients.

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