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As the mortgage transaction moves online, there will be room for another participant, a silent facilitator. RealEC is positioning itself to fill that role.
Spread out across a room on the second floor of a nondescript, four-story office building in Houston, Texas, about 70 Internet servers blink tiny green lights as they transfer XML-encoded data to mortgage transaction participants across the country. What looks like it could be the set for a science fiction thriller or a dot- com melodrama is actually RealEC's data center.
With roughly 400,000 XML transactions flowing through the system monthly, it may be the best of its kind in the industry.
RealEC was born back in 1998 out of e-commerce technologies that were being developed at Stewart Title and Micro General Corp., an outsourcing house for Fidelity National. The result was the RealEC Exchange, an intelligent routing process that offers traditional transaction capability and provides a standardized connectivity and data transport functionality for originators and vendors involved in the transaction. In other words, a way for mortgage service providers to more easily hook up with mortgage originators and sell more products.
Last July, Micro General formed a company called TXMnet to create products and added intelligence for the RealEC network. Through a series of acquisitions, this new company acquired the Exchange and renamed the resulting company RealEC Technologies. It offers a fully integrated transaction management solution, offering online real estate settlement products and services.
"Our whole concept at the outset was that the better integrations we can build to the service providers, the better we are going to be able to provide a tool and application and solution to the mortgage originators," says RealEC president Jeff Sanderson.
Today, the company has forged links with over 2,500 service providers, comprising, it says, about 80% of the business.
"The truth is that we are integrated with all of the major service providers out there," Mr. Sanderson says. "Pretty much anyone you do business with."
This is one of the things RealEC says it has done right in building its business. "We built the network before we brought it out to the mortgage world," says Mr. Sanderson. Now, when RealEC tells an originator that it has a network ready, there isn't a...