Acre's New Mortgage Affordability Tools
Firstly, what are mortgage affordability tools?
Before borrowing any money, it's essential to determine how much a lender is willing to lend to you (or your clients). Keep in mind that different lenders might offer varying amounts based on your individual circumstances.
Many lenders provide calculators and tools on their websites, allowing you or your broker to figure this out independently. However, the process can be time-consuming, as you'll need to enter all your customer information, debts, incomes, details on dependents, and property details for the purchase. Unfortunately, you'll have to repeat this procedure for each lender, which can take quite some time!
Systems like Acre provide functionality that does this hard work for you.
The problem with our old affordability tool
In the modern world, many mortgage software systems are enhanced by external services, just like our previous affordability functionality. While these external services can offer quick implementation of add-ons and features, which can greatly benefit our end users, there are some drawbacks to consider. One major concern is that we have limited control over these services, leading to a lack of transparency and customisation options. As a result, we become reliant on third-party updates and may sometimes disagree with their changes or priorities.
However, at Acre, we firmly believe that affordability is a core function of our system, and it's crucial to have the freedom to enhance and manage it independently. That's why we've taken matters into our own hands and built our own affordability solution! With this exciting development, we can now take complete control, ensuring that we continuously improve and cater to the unique needs of our users. This allows us to deliver an even more seamless experience to our valued customers.
Building Our Own System
Our primary objective was to create an Affordability service that could be easily expanded, maintained, updated, and integrated into further parts of our system. Affordability would do an even better job of complementing mortgage sourcing, making it much simpler for our brokers to access all the necessary information they need at a glance. We also aimed to link it more closely with our best-in-class Evidence of Research tools and generate far more accurate snapshots from each lender.
A huge team effort
With this clear goal in mind, our team dedicated all their efforts to developing our own Acre service. Remarkably, the team accomplished this monumental task in just six weeks, surpassing our expectations. The new service grants us the freedom and control to utilise case and individual data, enabling us to obtain more accurate results. We can also now address any issues, and create enhancements, that were previously out of our reach.
At Acre, we’re always looking for ways to improve our service to our brokers. Building our own mortgage affordability calculation system was a big step forward in this respect. When coupled with the release of our new and improved mortgage sourcing system, we believe we can make our users day to day work much more convenient and less stressful. You can read more about our new sourcing here