Wingspan Portfolio Advisors has announced the formation of the Wingspan Real Estate Network (WREN) for the purpose of offering an accelerated short sale management service to real estate professionals, lenders and mortgage servicers. Wingspan has been providing a significantly faster short sale management service to primary servicers, investors and other mortgage stakeholders for the past year, and is now leveraging its capabilities to broaden the offering directly to the national real estate community.
“The main gap has historically been the Realtor’s ability to navigate a complex process with numerous stakeholders while also obtaining timely decisions on short sale offers,” said Steven Horne, Wingspan’s founder and chief executive officer. “At Wingspan, we deal with servicers’ problem loans every minute of every day, and we speak their language. Marrying those skill sets with borrower-facing real estate expertise means that WREN can effect positive change: eliminating errors and faster short sales that work for all parties.”
Horne has assembled a team of experts to form WREN. To develop the operations side of the business, Horne named Chris Plummer, an industry expert who has focused on corporate relocation, financial services and new business creation, as managing director for WREN. Plummer works closely with Wingspan executives E.J. Kite, senior vice president of information management, and Robert Shiller, vice president of enhanced servicing solutions, on WREN’s daily operations and services development.
“The idea behind WREN is bringing in real estate expertise and leveraging Wingspan Portfolio Advisors’ impressive capabilities to create a service platform where short sales happen with speed and ease,” said Plummer. WREN speeds the process by facilitating the short sale process from end-to-end for real estate professionals, negotiating offers with all parties, and using Wingspan’s servicing contacts and experience to clear a path to closing around the usual obstacles.
“Realtors and others in the process need to be kept informed and on the same page,” says Steven Horne. “WREN uses the WREN Agent Portal to upload offers from real estate professionals and provides a web portal for servicers, investors, mortgage insurance companies and others to keep apprised of the transaction’s progress,” he explains. “Wingspan deals with lien holders and obtains all the information required to move the deal along crisply, and the technology keeps everyone, including the buyer and his agent, informed. It is the ideal scenario for the real estate community.”
By providing more transparency and facilitating the end-to-end process on behalf of the real estate professional, WREN’s executives expect their results will be about two to three times more efficient and successful than the national average for short sales. “There are other alternative short sale platforms and auction sites, but they do not bring the servicing capabilities and partnerships of Wingspan Portfolio Advisors,” says Plummer. “Also, with our efficiencies and scale we can charge a significantly smaller transaction fee at closing, and only when we’re successful,” he notes. “Through continued market research from all parties involved, we believe WREN is a service long anticipated within the industry and something real estate professionals will be excited about.” Horne concurs, particularly in the aftermath of the robo-signing crisis and the need for the recent MARS (Mortgage Asset Relief Services) regulations within the industry. “With the current impediments to foreclosure driving up losses, we think a 70 percent success rate is possible,” Horne says. “This approach to short sales can have a very positive, healing impact on the market.”
