By: Paul Wetzel for Tomorrow's Mortgage Executive
Increasing efficiency while decreasing costs is an ancient mortgage industry topic. We dealt with it at the turn of the century and made substantial gains only to watch them all roll back under the twin tides of the housing crisis and the regulatory onslaught. Operating costs are reaching the highest levels in history, challenging us to do again what we did more than ten years ago.
This time around we have better tools as well as new strategies for tackling tough profitability problems. While there are a number of ways lenders will drive costs lower towards pre-recession levels, at least two have not been leveraged to the extent they should. The first is linking all third parties in the origination cycle for easy, efficient flow and use of information and data. The second is paying close attention to lead generation and management.