HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation Receives Full ROI
Atlanta-based HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation is one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the Southeast and has ranked among the top online mortgage lenders in the United States. HomeBanc has 900 employees and offices throughout Georgia and Florida and opened an office in Charlotte in late 2002. HomeBanc closed $4.1 billion in residential mortgage loans in 2001 and closed $5 billion in 2002.
Challenge
HomeBanc ranks at the top of the industry for excellence in customer service. The price of this level of service is the high cost to produce loans, which negatively affects profits. As such, executive management directed all department heads to find ways to streamline their operations.
After intense scrutiny of their operating procedures, the 60-member post-closing department realized that they had numerous manual processes in place that were time-consuming, inefficient and required change. Initially the department processed 2,300 mortgage loan applications per month, averaging 300 pages in length for a total of 37,500 duplex pages. This high volume of mortgage applications consists of 160 different document types taken from five different loan packages: FHA/VA, Conventional, Second mortgage, and LIBOR loans. Initially, the cycle time to process these loans from signature to funding spanned 22 days. In addition to the duration, HomeBanc was also faced with the high cost of manually processing these documents, paying $414,000 annually to copy files in addition to document storage/retrieval and document shipping costs. To meet the goals and expectations set forth by the executive team, automation of the process was inevitable.