For years rising home prices have made it increasingly difficult for many consumers to find affordable housing, which is why mobile homes have increased in popularity. Often, mobile homes are located in mobile home parks or on family land which makes them ineligible for most loan programs. That’s where chattel loans come into play and many mortgage lenders are starting to recognize the importance of this housing segment. Likewise, lenders are quickly realizing that the lending technology segment lags this specialized industry. Here’s the good news: there is a chattel loan origination system available for these lenders – LendingPad.
Over the last year, LendingPad has worked with chattel loan professionals to enhance its support to the mobile home lending industry. In this article, we will share why this high tech, but user friendly platform helps chattel lenders add this niche lending to their arsenal of products.
So, what is a chattel loan anyway? Chattel loans are loans which use a manufactured or mobile home solely as collateral. Basically, it is using personal property as collateral and no land is involved. Typically, these homes are found in mobile home parks and are affixed to a rental lot. This is a niche area as most mortgage lenders require both home and land as collateral. So, many current and start-up lenders are beginning to recognize the need and profitability of chattel loans.
First of all, who are these chattel loan lenders? Actually, chattel lenders vary widely in size and include brokers, small portfolio lenders, large mobile home lenders, banks, and credit unions. No matter the size, the lenders’ chattel loan origination system needs are very similar across the board. These include:
If you are currently a chattel lender or considering the addition of this area to your platform, it will not take long to figure out that the typical loan origination systems will not cater to or understand mobile homes without land. Of course, if you happen to be a huge company and millions of dollars to spare, you can afford whatever you need. Right? But what if you’re not Warren Buffet? You need something that doesn’t take $100,000 or more to create. Plus, you probably do not have the time to help develop a brand-new LOS. You want to sign up, get trained, and start originating today.
Fortunately, LendingPad has done the homework and has created solutions for this niche within its award-winning platform.
LendingPad is already known for its user friendly and innovative system. From the beginning, our leaders set out to make an affordable LOS that meets lender needs in this technology driven era. Daily, our LendingPad team solves problems, trains lender staff, and constantly adding on benefits.
Like any lender, choosing an LOS means comparing the price, integration, and ease of use. Yes, these are key and we check all these boxes. But, then we get to the tough stuff. Finding a chattel loan origination system that understands and works with the following fields is finding a needle in a haystack.
With most loan origination systems, these required mobile home lending fields just are not available. This doesn’t even count the confusion you will see on the “not owning the land” thing! In the end, we want to stay ahead of the lending curve and provide a platform to help lenders in this key area of affordable lending.
So, you can enter a chattel loan into LendingPad and it works well. But, what about closing documents, servicing, credit reporting, flood certification, and compliance testing? Any LOS can integrate to pull credit, flood, etc, but it is another ball game to do this for mobile home loans when land is not involved. Guess what? LendingPad saves the day here as well!
We are already set up to integrate with vendors for preparing chattel loan specific closing documents and we are improving every day. Coming soon, we will provide closing documents preparation within our system which saves costs and time.
Obviously, lenders need to keep the regulators happy and our easy to create compliance reports may be uploaded easily to NMLS and to state licensing agencies.
Do you service your own loans or use a third-party servicer? As you know, moving a loan from origination, funding, to servicing needs to be seamless. We currently have systems set up to export file data to a servicing platform. Additionally, we have the ability to create custom integration so that your loan specific data can be relayed to servicing with minimal to no data entry.
We love working with lenders and brokers. It's why we exist! So, let’s have a conversation. We want to know your goals and needs. Then, we want to play a key role in building and sustaining your chattel lending strategic plan.
Email contact@lendingpad.com today!