DataVerify has enhanced its fraud management platform, DRIVE (Data Risk Intelligent Verification Engine) to help mortgage lenders identify and avoid potential short sale and property flipping losses. As the housing industry continues to struggle, short sales have become more commonplace. A homeowner sells his property for less than the outstanding balance on the mortgage, to avoid foreclosure and to permit the lender to receive some return on the investment. At the same time, property flipping cases have also been accelerating, primarily as a result of depreciating property values.
"Our customers tell us these new tools are working and the reason why they work is because we apply what we learn from our customers' own experiences," said Steve Halper, president of DataVerify. "In reviewing customer transactions, we discovered that:
►Seven percent of the properties are valued under current market value for other similar comparable properties.
►Three percent involve transactions in which the borrower is in the real estate or mortgage industry and did not disclose that fact.
►Four percent involve transactions in which the borrower has undisclosed self-employment.
►Four percent involve transactions in areas with very high rates of property flipping activity.
►Four percent contain IRS-validated tax transcript income variances of greater than 20 percent."
DataVerify has incorporated a national building permit dataset into DRIVE. Currently containing 88 million permits on properties in more than 4,000 cities in the U.S., this data will allow lenders to greatly reduce the amount of time and resources spent manually calling individual building departments to request permit data on a specific property.
"The new short sale and property flipping fraud detection capabilities from DataVerify meet and exceed all stated industry needs today," said Halper.
For more information, visit www.dataverify.com.
