Ernst Publishing Company has announced that the company has rolled out a new collaborative fee management system that allows settlement agents to work with lenders to negotiate fees and then manage these fees in a Web-based tool through which they can certify that the fees are accurate and then make them available to lenders who need to provide Loan Estimates required under the new TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rules. The technology responds to a trend that is seeing lenders drop their contracts with smaller settlement services companies due to concerns that they won't have certified accurate fees available at the time the lender must issue the Loan Estimate.
"This software allows smaller settlement agents to protect their businesses," said Jan Clark, vice president of sales and marketing for Ernst Publishing. "A single mistake will be enough to delay the closing and lenders have already realized that they can't afford it. By managing their own fees and providing a certification to lenders that these fees are accurate, all settlement services providers can now protect their valuable lender relationships by helping their partners remain compliant."
The Web-based TRID program is simple to use and uses MISMO data standards to allow the settlement agent to enter pre-negotiated fees that include fields for the required services by geography, and then certify that the fees are accurate with a single click. Agents can access the system at any time. Ernst then loads this fee information into a lender's custom fee engine and when the company is ready to create a new TRID Loan Estimate, the certified accurate fees for their settlement agent partners will automatically be loaded into the disclosures and are compatible with nearly every LOS and closing system in the marketplace.
Ernst programs process an average of 150 million real estate transactions every year, industrywide. Since the company was founded 26 years ago, Ernst has processed more than one billion transactions.
