Why is it important for mortgage companies to scan mortgage documents?

In the aftermath of the economic downturn that has been wrecking commercial interests all over the world, the US mortgage industry is realizing better ways to propel itself into a more organized and effective working mannerism. Mortgage lenders have been forced to take a serious look at the functionality and induce methods that can substantially reduce costs and increase their chances of success in mortgage-related legal predicaments such as handling foreclosures.

Efficient Mortgage Processing — homeowners often demand that the lender provides original documents that contain the financial history and a list of any financially obligations related to the concerned property. Typical documents that are often demanded by prospective property buyers include documents detailing the sale/resale history and securities. Securities are the original legal note that bears the signature of the homeowner. These are often difficult to locate if the property has been sold/resold numerous times over a period.

The simplest solution lies in scanning such security notes and electronically storing them in the form of scanned images. This also helps to negate the costs that are often incurred in extracting original documents from government warehouses — a process that is time consuming and could create a time gap during which a home buyer’s interest can be lost.

Handling Faster Turnarounds — many mortgage companies are now projecting themselves as being able to provide a quicker turnaround time (for mortgage processing). To make this a reality, it is vital that a major portion of post-loan documentation is conducted via transmitting/accessing records that have been electronically saved. A faster workflow process means that the customer is given lesser time to think away from his funding decision and the loan is quickly executed, i.e. giving the customer lesser time to reconsider his decision.

There is another aspect of benefiting from faster mortgage operations. Thousands of smaller brokers depend upon sending loan applications to be funded by larger, established lenders. Many times, a broker submits the same application to numerous mortgage companies. Whosoever responds first, is the one that gets to handle the portfolio. Companies that have PDF-based operations stand to gain substantially, since their turnaround time would be drastically lesser than that of conventional mortgage firms.

Handling Mortgage Foreclosures — it has been confirmed that judges are willing to view electronic documentation for foreclosure arguments. Lenders and nj real estate attorney who can provide paperwork in the form of PDF files for quickly overviewing the documentation are able to establish that they are still holding on to the loan.

Nearly 2.3 million homeowners have faced foreclosure proceedings last year and even more are on the verge of losing their homes in the current fiscal.

Inability to present the demanded records is the primary reason why many mortgage-servicing companies are unable to support their foreclosure arguments in the court. Lack of the original Note alone counts for about 40% of the foreclosure proceedings that went against the contesting mortgage companies. ‘Produce-the-Note’ demand wherein lenders have been asked to locate paperwork that simply cannot be traced can single-handedly delay a foreclosure for about 10-to-12 months. Often, the apprehension related to the time wastage in digging-up conventionally stored documents is used as a pressure tactic against the lender, forcing him to renegotiate his conditions for the mortgage — an apparently insignificant aspect regarding the storage medium of mortgage documents can directly hamper the profitability of a mortgage deal for the lender.

Paperless Medium — it is easy-to-comprehend that an increased use of accessing/sharing mortgage records and processing documents that have been scanned and saved as PDF files means a gradual shift towards a paperless environment. This means direct, daily cost savings. Being paperless, i.e. adopting an electronic documentation format through the scanning of paper records means:
• Using a central, secured, electronic mortgage information storehouse that can be accessed from remote locations and shared with mortgage partners like third-party vendors.
• Presenting prospective customers with a more organized and transparent process — removing the fear of fraudulent dealings from a customer’s mindset
• Reduced processing charges due to removal of paper shipment, storage (warehousing) costs and expenditures caused due to manual filing and copying.
• Presence of standardized loan folders containing the scanned files reduces chances of misplacing important documents.
• The opportunity to perform quicker, performance-linked, analytical electronic audits.
• Eliminating document copying requirements and manual file search — resulting in quicker retrieval of desired documents.

admin 21 January 2010 document scanning mortgage companies 1 Comment

The truth about SSD

No doubt you have heard about solid state drives (commonly abbreviated, SSD). So you might be wondering what are they and is it important that I get one. Well in basic terms a solid state drive is exactly what the name implies, a hard drive that carries no moving parts. A regular hard drive is made up of a bunch of disks (about the size of compact disks) that spin at high speeds (average between 5400rpm and 7200rpm) which allows you to store information as well as read and write to the device. On the other hand a solid state drive carries none of these moving parts.

Advantages

Now the advantages of a solid state drive can be great or not so great depending on what your requirements are. Generally speaking, it’s harder for your information to be lost on a solid state drive because it carries no moving parts, thus if you should drop your device (in this case a netbook, notebook or desktop), your hard drive will still be in tact. Another advantage is the fact that solid state drives use less power and so are much better for power consumption in mobile systems (like netbooks and notebooks) then regular hard disk drives (HDD). Since the SSD use RAM like memory modules to store its information, the battery does not have to work very hard to keep spinning the hard disks it would have to do had it been a regular hard disk drive.

Another great advantage is the speed of SSD’s. They are much faster because their technology is similar to random access memory (RAM) in that they can be written to and from fairly fast. Last but not least SSD’s are smaller in size then regular HDD and so can hold more information in a smaller amount of space.

Disadvantages

Now as usual with any type of technology there are a few disadvantages that one might want to take into consideration before purchasing said thing. Dealing with SSD’s the major drawback is price. Since the technology is pretty new (at least to the consumer public) it is quite expensive. You can pay round about $2-300.00 on a 320-680GB HDD for your desktop or notebook. On the other hand most SSD’s double in price for their equivalent in a regular hard disk format. For instance if you were to buy that same amount of space on an SSD you would have to be willing to pay nearly or in excess of $1,000 (600+GB = $1,000).

Another major drawback is the “bugginess” of a lot of SSD that are on the market. As I said before the technology is pretty new on the consumer front and just like any new technology, bugs and troubles always follow. Without calling names, many manufacturers have been plagued with problems such as their SSD loosing space over time due to firmware problems. More importantly sometimes fixes are not available in a timely fashion.

Another problem is the sheer performance upgrade and speed of most computers is quite minimal, and unless you are a power user you will not notice any major differences in performance. In fact if you’re reading this article chances are you won’t need an SSD for performance reasons. In terms of battery life, it would be cheaper in most cases to buy another battery of the same size or an extended one then installing an SSD on your laptop or buying one with the option as it would be less expensive.

Conclusion

So here is my proposition. Unless you are filthy rich, or you are a computer power user you might want to think twice before getting yourself one. But if you are clumsy and prone to drop your system then you might want to consider going with an SSD for data protection. Speaking of which, your best option in that case would be to combine an SSD with a ruggedized notebook so you’re not just securing one component, but the whole system.

As I have said many times before, the best thing to do is to wait a few years before adopting a new technology because if you do wait, you will save yourself headache and money as the prices of anything in the technology field always go down and never up.