eMortgageDesk: Price Your
Mortgage Pipeline in Real Time

Digitizing the Workflow... Imagine that you're a lender. You've got a pipeline of loans at various stages of approval. And every day (every hour?) you're looking at the capital markets in order to hedge your position. In other words, you want to make sure that you can get the capital to fund your commitments without losing money on the loans. Now imagine that you can log on to your intranet and quickly get the status of all the loans in your pipeline. As Tim Mueller, CEO of Reaxon, recently told me in New York, that can be critical in today's volatile capital markets. You don't have the time to wait for a paper-based report. Markets move too quickly.

That's why Reaxon has created eMortgageDesk. Developed originally by KPMG, eMortgageDesk provides the infrastructure for lenders to process loans from origination to due diligence to closing, and even securitization. EMortgageDesk is currently being piloted by Morgan Stanley and John Hancock with a full launch planned during the second quarter of 2001. EMortgageDesk is an ASP, meaning that eMortgageDesk provides its service over the web and that customers use eMortgageDesk's server to enter and store their data. The cost to use eMortgageDesk is $25 per quote, $2,000 per application and $500 per securitized loan.

I love the concept of digitizing the workflow and mention it frequently during my presentations on the net. Almost every facet of the real estate process will become digitized. And, yes, it will be a battle because the mere creation of a web-based service doesn't guarantee adoption. But over time, market leaders will force competitors to embed the net into their core services.

--Peter Pike