Lendicom Inc. Releases Online Commercial Mortgage Matching Tool

Aaron Heinrich (Lendicom Inc.) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:29:49 -0600

PORTLAND, OR - Lendicom Inc., based in Portland, Oregon, has released an online application intended to help borrowers and brokers looking for commercial funding find the most appropriate lenders in an efficient and cost-effective way.

The application, hosted at http://www.lendicom.com, is centered around its commercial loan submission engine, which allows the financing requests of brokers and borrowers to be matched against the profiles of lenders' programs with an unprecedented level of accuracy, and enables its users to submit their requests directly to the matching lenders.

The service is offered free of charge and without obligation to brokers and borrowers, and there are currently over one hundred direct commercial lenders offering their programs for dynamic search on the site. The company reports that new lenders are applying for inclusion at the rate of approximately 7 per week.

Development of the site was prompted by the absence of services that effectively applied, in a cost effective manner, the matching framework of, for instance, online travel sites, to the unique problems of the commercial mortgage industry. "A few companies had made great progress in this direction," says A. Heinrich, president of the company, "but we believed that in general they were either too expensive for their users or had not developed the matching and profile creation process fully enough."

Beside the core function of matching brokers and borrowers with appropriate lenders, Heinrich reports that Lendicom's more general goal is to harness the unique capabilities of the internet to streamline the communication process between these parties. Planned improvements to the application include a document management system, which will allow brokers and borrowers to upload documentation, in digital form, and attach it to their financing requests, for transfer to matching lenders.

Commercial Mortgages and the Internet

Aaron Heinrich (Lendicom Inc.) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:08:45 -0600

The development of Lendicom.com has been driven by the basic convictions that (1) the potential of the internet in increasing the efficiency of commercial mortgage loan origination simply has not been harnessed effectively; (2) that this potential is very great, and that (3) one can only figure out how to fully harness this potential by listening to the people that will use the tool.

Now, a matching/submission tool is probably the most obvious thing the internet can potentially do well for the commercial mortgage industry. At present our primary focus is developing such a commercial loan matching/submission tool that is truly versatile and sophisticated enough that, first, commercial lenders don't feel as if they have to compromise when entering the information concerning their products, and second, the results of the matching process are precise enough that our matches are ACTUAL matches. In other words, a lender only receives proposals he would follow up on is he were interviewing the broker/borrower himself.

On the one hand, we want to eliminate the situation in which a commercial lender says, for example: "Well, we don't really have X, so I'll have to put in Y there instead." We want to allow lenders to be as specific as they want to be, but also have the latitude to be general in their representation as well. You should to be able to choose how big or small a net you want to cast, even if there is only a very, very particular and elusive type of fish you want to catch. To continue the metaphor, there are as many types of fish as there are commercial mortgage loans, and as many types of fishing boats as there are lenders. So the process of developing a good matching tool is inherently one of compromise. And we'll only be able to learn where to compromise and where it's crucial we don't by listening to all of our clients.

Now, in redefining this type of online matching/submission functionality as simply a versatile toolset commercial lenders can use to generate and manage their first contacts with borrowers and brokers, we shift our focus from the traditional commercial loan "lead engine" to something different and, I think, much more useful. People have been making a living generating and selling leads for a long time, and the internet has been used in this capacity before, as just another medium for transmission of these leads. I suppose certain aspects of Lendicom ressemble this, but what we do is fundamentally different in conception. Regarding the matching/submission tool--only one aspect of our services--our focus is not on soliciting leads ourselves and then passing them on to lenders; rather, our focus is on creating tools that allow lenders themselves to effectively harness the internet to generate leads for themselves, and that on the other hand allow brokers and borrowers to shop for and communicate with lenders more effectively.

So, yes, the matching/submission tool is important, and is, at the moment, our main focus. But the lead is just the first instance of communication between a broker/borrower and a lender during the whole process of origination, which, in the case of commercial mortgages, can often last as long as, say, five months. And plainly the internet can be, and already is, used as a communication tool throughout this process.

The commercial loan matching/submission process is just the first point in a potentially long line of communication between the commercial lender and the broker or borrower; and at the moment we are focusing on that point. However, we are also keenly aware of that longer line of communication that follows, and are constantly thinking about how the technology can be applied to it.

Everyone in the industry already uses the internet throughout the process of origination, whether they merely send a couple of emails here and there or are using a full-fledged networked documentation system. So again it's a question of expanding and refining that use of the internet for the specific needs of the commercial mortgage industry. How can we centralize the information, documentation and correspondence related to a particular commercial mortgage transaction? How can we make all of this more easily accessible to the interested parties and streamline its exchange?

As always, we're interested in hearing what commercial lenders and brokers think about these ideas and about any other features that might be useful. Don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

Aaron's Blog

Lendicom Inc. Releases Online Commercial Mortgage Matching Tool

Commercial Mortgages and the Internet