Luxury real estate broker The Agency enters mortgage lending
National Mortgage News
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Real estate brokerage The Agency is adding mortgage lending with a new joint venture agreement. Alongside JV partner, Arizona-based mortgage broker Barrett Financial Group, the two companies this week announced the launch of lending business Aclara Lending, which will offer over 140 loan products geared toward high-end purchases. Among the products available to The Agency's clients are jumbo, super-jumbo and non-QM mortgages, the JV's leaders said.? With initial mortgage operations aimed at the Southern California market, Aclara hopes for greater expansion to eventually serve buyers across the U.S.
Enhancements to UWM's chatbot, which is dubbed ChatUWM, include brokers now being able to "chat with a document," the bot being able to calculate borrower income and upload a loan right to the wholesale lenders application system. The mega lender introduced its chatbot built for brokers in May. At the time, the company predicted that its user base would migrate over to ChatUWM to get answers to all of their questions. "Brokers are going to want a lot more out of it, because they're going to want to start acting as if ChatUWM is a ChatGPT for them, and that's exactly what we're going to give them," said Jason Bressler, the firm's chief technology officer.
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The large industry vendor has sold a majority stake in its Securent Risk Retention Group to VineLight Ventures. The move reunites Securent's president, Justin Vedder, with Bryan Binder and Jason Garmise. All three previously worked at CastleLine, a provider of mortgage data and insurance products later sold to Altisource. The transaction will support SitusAMC's growth in its other business lines, particularly those supporting residential mortgage-backed securities, while preserving access to Securent's risk management.
The Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines made an additional $6 million of funds available to its members for a program that subsidizes a mortgage rate buydown they can offer consumers. Since it launched the program, called Mortgage Rate Relief, this spring, FHLB Des Moines members have funded over 1,000 loans in underserved areas by permanently reducing interest rates by approximately 2 percentage points lower than the current market rate. This relief was available to both purchasers and existing borrowers who were earning up to 80% of the area median income.
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