LodeStar is excited to host a guest-authored post this week from BeSmartee’s Anthony Miller. BeSmartee offers an award-winning Mortgage Point-of-Sale (POS) platform for mortgage lenders.

LodeStar’s closing cost calculator integrates seamlessly with BeSmartee’s digital mortgage POS to provide transparency and improve efficiency.

Transparency is a difficult goal to achieve in mortgage lending. This is simply because of all of the factors involved in calculating closing costs — from real estate attorneys to lender fees and more. The complexity and variability of calculating costs adds to friction to the lending cycle, and is one of many components contributing to the notoriously long and tedious process mortgage lending is known to be. 

Closing costs are often also a question mark that persists in the minds of borrowers, until they finally close on a property and can sometimes surprise (especially first time) homebuyers.

LodeStar’s closing cost calculation software was designed to ease this part of the process, and when integrated with BeSmartee’s digital mortgage point-of-sale (POS), lenders can give borrowers 100% real-time transparency into their closing costs. Aligning your borrower’s expectations and delivering speedy results are two of the most important factors in providing quality customer service as a lender.

What Are Closing Costs?

Closing costs are expenses beyond the property’s price that buyers and sellers incur during a real estate transaction. They can include loan origination fees, discount points, appraisal fees, title searches, insurance, surveys, taxes, deed recording fees and credit report charges.

Closing costs range from 3%–6% of the home’s purchase price and vary depending on the state, loan type and mortgage lender. On average, homebuyers spend $5,749 on closing costs (including taxes).

Lenders are required to disclose these costs in an estimate in three days following a complete application. The estimate outlines closing costs and other loan details, and may change by closing day. Sometimes borrowers are more or less blindsided by the difference between their estimate and actual closing costs, which can cause significant stress and loss of trust with their lender.

Automating Closing Cost Calculations in Your Mortgage POS Provides 100% Real-Time Transparency 

When LodeStar’s closing cost calculator is integrated into BeSmartee’s mortgage POS platform, consumer information is automatically plugged into the calculator that is configured to your specifications. You can then instantly generate accurate quotes for title agent fees, title premiums, transfer taxes and recording fees.

• Generate fees instantly: Being able to give your customers fee information in real time ensures their expectations are in tune with the reality of the process.
• Quotes are 100% guaranteed for accuracy: Minimizing the difference between a closing estimate and actual cost helps build trust and long lasting customer relationships. Minimizing surprises and aligning expectations instills confidence in your expertise and satisfaction with your service.
• Simple and streamlined process: Enabling automatic and accurate calculations helps prevent human error related to redundant data entry and reduces the time it takes to perform closing cost calculations to virtually zero. The faster you can give your borrowers accurate estimates, the more repute you earn.
• TRID compliant: The Truth in Lending, Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act Integrated Disclosure rule, or “know before you owe” rule, requires lenders to disclose all costs to buyers. Expanding regulatory requirements make compliance a dedicated and costly chore. Together, LodeStar and BeSmartee automate compliance, so you don’t have to spend money on a full time servicing team.
• Ability to process more loans with greater efficiency: Today’s mortgage market is pressuring lenders to streamline loan originations as much as possible in order to reduce costs and maximize the revenue they can generate from a shrinking pool of eligible borrowers. Integrated solutions that automate the lending cycle easily respond to market fluctuations and allow leaner teams to process more loans faster. Automatically generating accurate closing cost calculations can save loan officers time and spare borrowers surprise charges.

Why Interoperable, Integrated Solutions Matter

Software is tricky. Without the right APIs, software solutions will not always play nice together. If your digital mortgage POS doesn’t integrate with your closing cost calculator, then you’re stuck manually keying in your borrowers information from the mortgage POS platform into the calculator.

This not only takes time, it opens the door to human error, inaccurate estimates and unhappy customers. It also defeats the purpose of automation, and prevents the possibility of providing real-time information.

Integrated solutions, on the other hand, will automatically transfer and verify data from the POS to other steps in the lending cycle, like calculating closing costs. This saves loan officers enormous time by sparing them from re-entering information or performing manual calculations.

Give Your Borrowers the Transparency and Service They Deserve 

Customer satisfaction can be improved when borrowers aren’t left in the dark about their loan application. The less time they spend anxiously waiting for information, the more they know about the next steps and the more their loan officer can act as a liaison, the more confidence they’ll have in you as a lender.

When complete transparency and speedy service are enabled, lenders and borrowers win. 

BeSmartee and LodeStar help lenders ensure compliance with expanding mortgage regulations and reduce their workload by automating closing cost calculations. We also help borrowers by delivering accurate fee estimates in real-time, which ensures they won’t be surprised down the road by unexpected costs and reinforce trust in their lender.

Schedule a demo to learn more about the powerful solutions LodeStar and BeSmartee offer so you can give your customers the ultimate streamlined mortgage experience.