by Ravi Desai
25 April, 2022
Published April 25, 2022
In today’s mortgage market, it is important to know your competitive position in any given loan scenario. Interest rates are rising. Lenders are seeing less refinance volume and shifting focus to purchases. Whether seeking to enter new geographies or offer different loan programs, visibility into competitor product and pricing strategies—as well as price movement within a specific market—is imperative.
Timely Data
When choosing a benchmarking pricing comparison tool, it’s important to evaluate the source of the data. Many solutions utilize survey data—an honor system approach—and are at risk of inaccuracy. Data could be hours or even days old by the time you view it. To price confidently, lenders need a solution that provides verified data pulled directly from a product and pricing engine—in real time—to ensure complete accuracy. In addition, the product and pricing engine must have an extensive market share so you can confidently build insight into many different loan programs and geographic locations.
Real-Time Insights
To compete effectively, lenders need to be able to run reports for individual pricing scenarios at any point in the day. This is only possible with a real-time, ad-hoc search tool. A real-time pricing insight service makes competitor pricing from a product and pricing engine visible to investors. With a transparent, contributory service, investors make their institution name visible for their product and pricing programs. With such pricing insight, participating investors can benchmark their pricing in various loan programs, or geographic regions they may seek to enter.
Granular Search
Competitor pricing data can also be used as a “sanity check” to validate existing strategies as well as identify new opportunities. After all, in today’s competitive and volatile market, lenders can’t simply react to what is happening in the marketplace. Lenders need to create opportunities by being proactively engaged in the current market environment to not just survive but thrive. To understand current market trends accurately, you need tools that provide increased pricing granularity and specificity.
Being able to configure pricing scenarios and receive email alerts when scheduled reporting is available is crucial for facilitating daily decision-making. This is only made possible with significant granularity in pricing discovery where lenders can search by loan characteristics such as loan terms, LTV, FICO and specific data down to local market conditions. In addition, how data is displayed will directly impact the efficiencies of your team. Find a solution that displays detailed data in a concise, easy-to-understand, visual format to instantly see how your institution compares to other industry-leading investors.
Factors Beyond Pricing
Keep an eye on the competition while evaluating the effectiveness of current strategies. After all, pricing is just one component. A benchmark pricing comparison tool will help you determine if program pricing in specific markets is helping or hurting competitiveness. If pricing isn’t the issue, you’ll be able to quickly analyze other factors, such as fulfillment inefficiencies or customer experience issues.
Compete Smarter, Pivot Faster
Knowing how peer institutions price across markets at any time is invaluable to identifying new opportunities, evaluating whether or not to enter a geographic area, validating current strategies and more. With data to make sense of any market environment and product strategy, the right benchmark pricing comparison tool empowers lenders to compete wisely and grow confidently.
Click here for more information on how Investor Pricing Insight by Optimal Blue can help you easily compare pricing and eligibility strategies to peer organizations.
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