08 Aug 2023
However, it’s also a competitive environment to secure high quality borrowers in the mortgage markets.
Lenders must be highly responsive to customer loan applications – consumers in the ‘app on my device’ world have become accustomed to speed and responsiveness in everything they do. Lenders need to continually innovate and differentiate their products. In the face of relentless pressure to stay one step ahead, any delays to approving new loans mean customers can shop around. One of the slowest stages in approving an application is valuation. You need an efficient valuation system that will accelerate your loan approval turnaround time.
When you are responsible for lending, not only do you need to assess the capability of the borrower to repay the loan, but you also need to assess the property by having a valuation you can depend on.
That is often a problem. There is a lack of digital information – you rely on manual valuations or else a mix of some manual and some automated property valuations. This can be slow. You are frustrated by the speed at which you can obtain a property valuation when the only way is to have an on-site valuer attend. To your customer, your organisation may appear too slow to react to their mortgage lending request.
Valuation reports are typically generated at a specific moment in time. However, relying solely on this single snapshot or on historical data diminishes our capacity to identify scenarios where risk, pricing and desirability of a specific loan may be more interesting than first appearances suggest.
Additional insights into the districts where property valuations may be rising or falling add to understanding, and potentially influence the outcome of a decision, or the margin on the loan.
There are solutions which can help you in both decision-making and the turnaround time of in principle decisions.
Accurate and up to date data and insights on transactions, property valuation and market liquidity can help identify the opportunities to optimize the bank’s mortgage lending business and respond faster to loan applications.
The use of automated valuations (AVM) reduces the overall expenditure on traditional valuations and appraisals to reach the first in principle decision. This approach helps in cutting costs in cases where a loan does not proceed due to a customer withdrawing.
In more complex lending decisions, where both personal expertise and broader market knowledge may play a role in deciding whether or not to lend, consideration should be given to the collateral being offered by the borrower. For example, you might lend money to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who often have loans secured with their factory, house or workshop which are being used as collateral. In these situations, the contextual insights you find related to these types of assets become far more important.
Being accountable for making critical lending decisions on how to deploy capital to achieve the best returns is quite a responsibility. Once you have access to extensive information distilled into relevant insights, together with accurate automated valuations, your loan approval turnaround time is far quicker leading to higher satisfaction and lower attrition rates.
In addition, you can strategize more and put in place appropriate lending policy guidelines at macro and micro level. By comparing two different districts in a single town, one area may offer more favourable lending conditions with higher liquidity levels and rising valuations with lower risk to your capital and the potential for long-term capital returns.
