One of the challenges for the housing market has been that the mortgage investment community and the government agencies that regulate it make policies and decisions that affect the entire housing market far from direct knowledge of the local market. Looking back over the last several years, it seems that many of today's housing market issues could have been avoided, if investors only had a crystal ball, or access to current data on house prices and valuations. With the proper information and analysis, the mortgage industry may have been able to foresee that we were heading towards a housing bubble that was about to burst.

For example, a better understanding of the concentration of higher-risk mortgages in local communities, coupled with the expansion in the number of investor and non-owner-occupied properties, skewed the traditional supply and demand characteristics of many neighborhoods. What resulted when those loans failed was that their impact created a ripple effect through markets at large.

Data, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to transform data into meaningful analytics, is the wave of the future. The data and reporting features which RPR provides to REALTORS®, contain an analytical component, which has the potential to help close the information "divide" with the mortgage industry. This need is what attracted me to RPR, to work with the mortgage community to promote adoption of RPR's analytic capabilities that will serve the housing market from point-of-sale to the secondary mortgage market.

From Real Estate to Mortgage Collateral

Each of the participants in the U.S. housing finance system is increasingly looking to the REALTOR® as an ally in helping drive information for the long-term success of the nation's housing industry. "Boots on the ground" is the term often used in the mortgage market to describe the role REALTORS® play relative to the mortgage investor. By trusting the REALTOR'S®"on-the-ground" expertise and know-how, particularly of the local markets, the mortgage industry is increasingly looking to the REALTOR® to provide the most accurate information about market trends and home prices. By improving REALTOR®'s access to quality data, while leveraging best practices in appraisals and broker price opinions (BPOs), and using its substantial data competencies to develop the tools that equip the REALTOR® with new capabilities, RPR is enabling the future REALTOR® which will benefit the entire marketplace.

While RPR is making these tools available to REALTORS®, as a benefit of NAR membership, it is also enabling others in the mortgage industry to benefit from the analytical capabilities built from RPRs unique products. Mortgage industry players such as lenders, mortgage servicers, secondary mortgage market investors, and even regulators are all seeking ways to better understand housing values and trends – an important component to avoiding a future housing bubble which could burst.

A key goal in creating RPR was to support and improve the core competencies of REALTORS® to increase efficiency and access to quality data for use with an increasingly technology-empowered consumer. Additionally NAR understands that RPR can power its 1,000,000 members with the ability to provide a flow of real estate pricing and valuation analytics from the REALTOR® at the point-of-sale to the back-end mortgage market investor. This will provide the liquidity needed to finance borrowers' home ownership goals and rebuild a more fluid housing market.

To view the original article, visit the RPR blog.

Other posts in this series

• Common Ground
• Boots on the Ground
• How Everybody Wins, Starting with the Consumer