Castle & Cooke Mortgage, LLC, Opens Doors with DataTrac EDM
Operating Paperless, Experiencing Substantial Savings
Company
Castle & Cooke Mortgage, LLC, is a medium-sized mortgage lender based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with branches located in Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, North Carolina, Texas and Utah.
Challenge
When Castle & Cooke Mortgage's founders sat down to develop the company's business model before lending operations began in 2005, they knew how they wanted their business to run - or, more specifically, how they did not want it to run. After years working for other mortgage lenders, they had each witnessed first-hand the costly inefficiencies associated with printed loan documents and wanted to run a paperless operation.
Matthew Pineda, president of Castle & Cooke, knew that in order to fulfill their vision as a paperless lending institution, they would need an electronic mortgage system that could integrate with DataTrac®, the core loan processing platform they had chosen to automate their lending fulfillment workflow.
"Our biggest advantage was that we knew what we wanted before operations began," said Pineda. "As a start-up firm, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to make everything the way we wanted it without having to deal with any historical documents. My colleagues and I had worked for different companies that did everything wrong. Our experiences taught us that we wanted to start a business that avoided the headaches others experienced in dealing with paper documents."
Solution
Castle & Cooke selected DataTrac Electronic Document Manager (EDM), Del Mar DataTrac's electronic document management solution designed to fit the needs of small to medium mortgage lenders.
Results
DataTrac EDM provides Castle & Cooke with a paperless means of imaging, archiving, retrieving, and distributing all documents associated with their loan files. As a result of its seamless integration with DataTrac, the company has conducted its business without developing a dependency on physical (paper) loan files; providing staff with quick, cross-organizational access to electronic documents in real time.
"There is a huge economy of scale with DataTrac EDM," said Pineda. "We process more than 250 loans per month with only two underwriters, and we could easily double in size without having to add any more. We budget $35 per file for shipping, printing, and toner, compared to $110 per file we've seen at other companies. Further, DataTrac EDM enables us to save more than $100 per file in review fees that investors charge if we send files electronically; and we sell loans in an average of 6.8 days on the secondary market compared to the four weeks it would normally take to sell physical documents - saving us on interest paid to warehouse lenders for the time our loans spend on their lines."
Because of the real-time accessibility to loan files that DataTrac EDM provides across the entire organization, staff can quickly and efficiently work in an environment that is free of the clutter and hassles associated with physical documents. And, it enables Castle & Cooke to more easily and cost-effectively manage loan files while avoiding the costs associated with shredding and storing documents.
"Because DataTrac EDM provides us with a paperless means of doing business, I never even think about storage," said Pineda. "Other companies have to pay to house loan documents in storage facilities, and then pay fees to pull files out of storage. I know one lender that pays extra rent on over 2,000 square feet every month to store files in-house. Not having to worry about storage is a tremendous cost savings for us." Finally, Pineda emphasizes that, despite a declining market, Castle & Cooke has not had to lay off a single person.
"The enormous loan capacity that DataTrac EDM provides has prevented us from having to lay off any staff," said Pineda. "Many lenders hired large numbers of underwriters to support high volumes of loans during the boom. Now that things have slowed, they are cutting staff in an attempt to increase margins. Not only does this sacrifice employees and morale, it sacrifices service because closing times are now increased due to reduced loan capacities."
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