Here’s a riddle: How can a mortgage broker still write a loan for a cash buyer? When the cash buyer is actually a proxy for the actual buyer.
It works like this: The buyer identifies the place he wants to purchase. He and his agent then make a cash offer through Zavvie, a financial technology firm bringing liquidity to the residential marketplace.
If the seller accepts, the Boulder, Col.-based company buys the house. Then, the actual buyer has up to 90 days to arrange for a mortgage to buy the house from Zavvie, which has just launched a new AI-powered platform to speed the process.
Face it. Cash is king. Sellers love cash offers because they come with fewer hiccups. Buyers can close faster and there is no chance that their financing will fall through.
According to ATTOM Data Solutions, cash deals accounted for nearly two out of every five single-family house sales last year. That’s a lot of potential mortgages down the drain.
But not everyone has the money on hand to make an all-cash offer, putting them at a distinct disadvantage when going up against those who can pay cash. Enter Zavvie, which, for a fee ranging from 0,5% to 1.9% of the purchase price, comes to the non-competitive buyer’s rescue.
And with its new HomeFAI platform, the company can deliver faster and stronger offers, bringing more certainty to the process.
“This is AI meets modern home financing,” says Lane Hornung, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “And it’s transforming the way people buy homes...ensuring that more buyers can compete and succeed.”
Now available in all 50 states, the HomeFAI platform is already powering some of the country’s top mortgage companies, with partnerships that include 10 of the top 30 lenders, including Guarantee Rate, Zenith, PRMG and Hallmark Home Mortgage. Some 15,000 loan officers and 70,000 real estate agents have access to the program through the company’s 125 partners, including realty brokerage firms JPAR, Cutler Real Estate and RE/MAX Alliance.
And with its new speedier platform, the company says its offers are experiencing greater acceptance. More importantly, nine out of 10 back-end buyers finance their deals when they purchase their homes from Zavvie.
More and more loan officers across the country are accepting the program, too. It “has been a total game changer,” said Jerry Kaplan, executive vice president of capital markets at Luminate Power Buyer in Englewood, Col. “Our borrowers can compete on the highest level.”
Ashley Sattler, an originator at Cross Country Mortgage in Columbus, Ohio, said she introduces the option with every borrower “because it puts my clients in the strongest position possible.”
The HomeFAI works with most loan origination systems and underwriting platforms, Zavvie says, and can be seamlessly integrated for easy adoption.
