Retreat Capital Enhances its Predictive Modeling Services

""Retreat Capital Management Group"":http://retreatcapital.com/index.html, a Lake Forest, California-based provider of loss mitigation and portfolio[IMAGE]

management products for the mortgage industry, announced Thursday that it has deployed ""AnswerMine Group's"":http://answerminegroup.com/index.html analytic software to power its predictive modeling services for mortgage lenders and servicers.

By utilizing the company's newly-enhanced predictive modeling service, lenders and servicers will be able to proactively determine risk levels for mortgage loans and take decisive action to prevent delinquencies, defaults, and foreclosures, rather than reactively responding to troubles loans after the loan is already at risk.

""There's been a huge shift in the way mortgages are evaluated-we've moved from a property-centric approach to focusing much more on the borrower, which is exactly why lenders need to use the appropriate analytics"" says Stuart Cornew, managing director for Evanston, Illinois-based AnswerMine. ""Whether evaluating entire portfolios or individual loans, AnswerMine provides ‘bottom-up' information that incorporates borrower data as well as property and economic data to more accurately predict loan performance.""

Retreat Capital said the market is currently clogged with so many foreclosures and delinquencies that servicers can't keep up with the volume. And according to many experts, there is no sign of slowing down. The company cited a February 2010 article from the Wall Street Journal, which said the complexity of determining which borrowers qualify for easier loan terms, coupled with the backlog of millions of unresolved cases, is greatly contributing to the slowdown of the foreclosure process.

""There's no question that a certain percentage of foreclosures could be prevented if the lender or servicer would proactively present the borrower an appropriate solution,"" said Arvin Wijay, CEO of Retreat Capital Management.

Wijay said there are a variety of foreclosure alternative options, but lenders must first determine which solution is a best fit for each borrower. He explained that this decision must be made quickly in order to prevent the mortgage from becoming delinquent or getting closer to foreclosure. AnswerMine enables Retreat Capital's predictive modeling service to provide lenders and servicers with the information to do just that, Wijay said.

The predictive modeling services were created for lenders and servicers that want to implement targeted mortgage restructuring, retention, and originations. This service, which is fully configurable and flexible, offers improved service scoring and early warning indicators for mortgage valuation models, while ensuring that any chosen alternative solution is successful on a net present value basis.

""Accessing the risk level of mortgages gives lenders the power to determine the appropriate solution,"" Wijay said. ""This type of proactivity would make a huge impact on not only the number of defaults and foreclosures, but also the speed in which cases get handled.""