The HousingWire award spotlight series highlights the individuals and organizations that have been recognized through our Editors’ Choice Awards. Nominations for HousingWire’s TECH100 award are open now through Friday, December 23, 2022. Click here to nominate your organization.
Tech innovation in housing has come a long way over the last decade as antiquated processes have made way for digitization and streamlined workflows. Now, the challenge for many tech solution companies is ensuring that these new capabilities and processes can actually alleviate the fragmentation of the past.
“Real estate innovation has been highly focused on individual parts of the transaction workflow,” said Peter Bowman, Co-Founder & CEO of Flueid. “To move forward, the industry needs to focus on driving greater transparency across workflows by unifying these innovations — bringing the data, insights and the best of each process together — to unlock their full potential and deliver a modern digital transaction.”
Flueid was recognized as a 2022 TECH100 winner for its innovation in the real estate transaction process. An independent technology company, Flueid’s mission is to make the rigid real estate process more fluid — fueling transactions using data and insights to make them easily flow from start to finish.
Each year, HousingWire’s TECH100 award recognizes the most innovative and impactful companies in housing providing a definitive list of the top tech organizations in the industry for HousingWire readers.
HousingWire reached out to Bowman to learn more about how Flueid is rethinking standard real estate transaction processes and hear what’s to come for the company in the new year.
HousingWire: One of Flueid’s goals is to rethink best practices within the real estate process to make them smarter and more digital. What do you see as the most prominent, flawed process or roadblock that is currently affecting housing?
Peter Bowman: Real estate innovation has been highly focused on individual parts of the transaction workflow – whether that’s improving the borrower’s application process, digitizing title production and underwriting or advancing online notarization and eClosing capabilities. To move forward, the industry needs to focus on driving greater transparency across workflows and unifying these innovations – bringing the data, insights and the best of each process together – to unlock their full potential and deliver a modern digital transaction.
From Flueid’s perspective, we must begin by bringing insights from the downstream title process upfront into loan evaluation and underwriting, so both parties are working from the same information and can partner to engineer the most efficient workflows. By understanding the condition of title early in the transaction, it prevents lenders from having to go back to the consumer for more information, adjust the term of the loan or reset closing timelines, while ensuring title is working on opportunities they know are most likely to close.
HW: What do you consider to be some of the biggest hurdles in the digitization of the real estate transaction process?
PB: Digitization happened first within each individual workflow. Today, we are advancing that innovation by connecting the best of each process for greater transparency and efficiency from application to closing. With this comes two challenges: First, significant integration requires a huge focus on data handling and security to ensure the consumer is protected on one of their biggest investments. Security innovation will need to advance in parallel with workflow innovation, tapping into modern, token-based APIs and cloud-based services to drive a higher security standard for product development and partnerships — and, really for the industry at large.
Secondly, as transparency and collaboration advance, information and processes will be made accessible in entirely new ways. An exciting challenge is the new mindset and level of creativity this will bring to daily operations — one where we can reimagine current processes and optimize them for the future.
Take our Flueid Decision platform: We are challenging our lender partners to think about their workflow through an entirely new lens. We want to bring title data and insights into their core systems at the start of their process to make these smarter. The goal is to remove fragmentation between the lender and their title partners, so they are operating in lockstep. This drives higher closing ratios and a better overall experience for them and their consumers.
HousingWire: Are you able to share any of the projects or solutions that Flueid has in the works for 2023?
Peter Bowman: Flueid is focused on supporting our partners in every market cycle. We spent 2022 diversifying our tech stack to ensure our clients had a solution for today’s home equity market, while also preparing to launch additional transaction types in support of the next cycle. In 2023, we will add loss mitigation and loan modification as supported verticals within our Flueid Decision platform, while also focusing on integrations with like-minded partners to drive a more seamless and integrated transaction process. Our goal is to embed title data and insights into core operating systems across the transaction life cycle so no matter where a partner sits, they have a relevant and actionable set of information to improve their workflow.
