You’ve Got A Stack Of Property Images Piling Up, Your Excel Files Are Getting Too Large To Manage, And You’re Struggling To Spot Potential Risks Amongst The Sheer Volume Of Information You Have To Manage. Welcome To Construction Loan Management Hell.
For many loan managers, this is a daily reality; manual and in-house solutions can barely stay on top of the workload. The solution? Land Gorilla’s construction lending software.
Construction loan software enables lenders to efficiently manage every aspect of a construction loan, from pre-closing due diligence to post-closing draw administration. Scalable and flexible, Land Gorilla’s loan management software will enable you to manage thousands of renovation, construction-only, and construction-to-perm loan types.
With the right software, your construction loan managers will be able to do their jobs faster, more efficiently, and to a higher quality. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits a switch to Land Gorilla’s draw management solution will provide:
1. VISIBILITY ACROSS YOUR ENTIRE LOAN PIPELINE
One spreadsheet per loan seemed like a good idea when you were managing five different loans, but now that you’re managing tens or even hundreds of loans you’re overwhelmed.
Wouldn’t it be great to have access to an overview of your entire loan pipeline without having to spend hours collecting data first?
Construction loan software enables your team to see a pipeline view of all your loans, highlighting important information such as loan progress and conversion dates. Automated alerts and notifications signal when a contractor submits a draw request or other action items pop up, so you’re always on top of what needs to happen next].
2. AT-A-GLANCE TRACKING OF EVERY LOAN
Tracking progress of your loans shouldn’t require thumbing through multiple file folders or using cumbersome formulas in Excel. Land Gorilla’s construction lending software offers your employees a dashboard view of each and every loan, providing information on project duration, completion, and interest reserve.
Instead of spending their time collecting the information, administrators simply click on the appropriate loan to access real-time fully-updated information, enabling them to get on with their tasks quickly.
3. AVOID COMMON MISTAKES
When you manage construction loans on spreadsheets, you expose your business to risk. Common mistakes include losing information, inputting data incorrectly, and confusion from multiple users editing the same file.
These mistakes can result in the over-disbursement of funds and an inability to keep on track of licensing information, insurance, or project documentation. Switching to loan management software will ensure you that the construction loan remains in balance at all times and that you only release draw disbursements when work is completed.
Read: 10 Things You Need to Know About Construction Loan Spreadsheets.
4. EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE WITH PROJECT STAKEHOLDERS
Now, where’s that sticky-note…? When notes and communications get lost, actions get forgotten, the customer experience suffers, and you risk losing money.
Construction loan management software enables you to track your conversations, tasks, and notes within one system. You can also set up email reminders so that you never miss an important deadline.
5. TRANSPARENCY AND VISIBILITY FOR EVERY STAKEHOLDER
Keeping every party involved up-to-date is difficult when no-one is in the same location. Construction draw management software provides a portal that connects everyone involved in the loan.
By providing limited access to the variety of different parties involved in the project, you ensure that there is full transparency and visibility where it is needed. By providing access to information you improve the customer experience and reduce the amount of time you’ll spend managing the process.
6. IMPROVE DRAW MANAGEMENT PROCESSES BY 3.5X
Once you’ve got tens or hundreds of loans, it can be tough to remember and track the number of draws that have been made, let alone when and how much. With a manual approach, a draw request requires that you both release and track the draw – two separate actions; with lending software the system does both with one action.
With the Construction Loan Manager by Land Gorilla, the contractor requests draws directly through the system. When you choose to disperse the draw, the system automatically logs the details and calculates the percentage of disbursement and retainage.
7. STAY AHEAD OF YOUR COMPLIANCE RESPONSIBILITIES
Land Gorilla helps your compliance department stay ahead of the game, so you don’t have to sweat when the compliance officer comes knocking. The Contractor and HUD Consultant management tools make it easy for your team to monitor performance, documentations, and concentration.
The Land Gorilla team contains many experienced construction lending and risk management experts; they have worried about the details so that your compliance team can do what they do best without having to fiddle with complicated construction loan spreadsheets.
8. MANAGE 350% MORE LOAN VOLUME WITHOUT EXTRA HIRES
Streamlining your workflow with construction lending software will allow you to manage 350% more loan volume than with manual solutions.
We found that the average administrator can handle between 35 and 50 loans when using spreadsheets to manage construction loans. With construction lending software, that same admin is able to manage between 125 and 150 loans!
To achieve the same increase in volume using spreadsheets, you would need to hire another couple of administrators (at anywhere from $45,000 and $85,000 a year each). You do the math: it’s cheaper to implement a digital construction lending solution than it is to hire more staff.
9. REDUCE ONBOARDING TIME FROM 2 HOURS TO 10 SECONDS
Before moving to an automated system, our customers were spending an average of two hours onboarding every single loan. Once they’d switched over to Land Gorilla, they could achieve the same result with just 30 seconds of work.
Talk about a productivity boost! That’s an increase in onboarding speed of 240 times. It’s improvements such as these that enable admins to manage more loans while still freeing up time to deliver impacts in other areas.
10. DELIVER A SUPERIOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
By removing the tedium from your admin team’s workflow, they’ll spend less time updating spreadsheets, juggling files, and managing data. This frees them up to spend more time where they can add value: building relationships with your customers.
Improving customer’s experience will boost your brand reputation, decrease churn, and help convert your clients into ambassadors for your brand. Not only will your customers thank you, but so will your admins: they’ll be swapping the most tedious parts of their role for something much more rewarding.
11. SUPPORT GROWTH WITH TRUE SCALABILITY
The problem with spreadsheet-based solutions is that they aren’t scalable: the more loans you add, the more time-consuming it is to manage the process and keep data up-to-date and accurate. It’s not long before you reach a tipping point at which the cost in employee-hours required to manage the system far outweighs the cost to upgrade to something better.
Construction Loan Manager by Land Gorilla manages most of the data for you, which means your 100th loan takes no more effort to manage than your first. Unlike with spreadsheets, you can keep expanding with no fear of your system buckling under the pressure.
Learn more about Scaling Your Construction Loan Program
12. PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE
With scaling pricing, Land Gorilla is suitable for lenders of any size. Regardless of whether you’re managing ten loans or 100, you still only pay for what you use with a sliding scale that provides great value for businesses of all sizes.
Compared to setting up your own software system, which requires substantial upfront investment, using loan management software delivers the features you need for a fraction of the cost.
13. OUTSOURCE IT SECURITY AND MAINTENANCE
Any software solution has ongoing security and maintenance costs. When you use loan management software you don’t have to worry about these costs; everything is maintained for you as part of the ongoing service you purchase.
In comparison, a home-grown software solution will require servers to host it, engineers to maintain it, and significant security expertise to ensure your data doesn’t get stolen by hackers – a rising concern for many businesses.
14. ONBOARD NEW STAFF QUICKER
As with any ad-hoc system, a spreadsheet-based approach to managing loans becomes an expression of the personality of the process owner. That’s fine for one person, but what happens when they’re sick? Or you need to add additional staff members? The system that makes sense to one individual may be hard to learn for someone else.
By using just one easy-to-use system, on-boarding is much quicker. With all the information, files, and notes in one place, it just makes sense. It’s also easy for other employees to cover a co-worker’s administrative work if they’re sick or on leave – everything is just where they’d expect it to be.
15. REGULAR COMPLIANCE UPDATES
Changes in compliance requirements and other factors may necessitate changes to the way you manage your loans. With construction loan software, these changes are automatically provided for you.
You don’t have to worry about adjusting your spreadsheets, or hiring programmers to make changes to your own system. Land Gorilla does everything for you.
Become a Better Construction Lender Today
Still using an outdated spreadsheet system? Or struggling to keep your in-house system up-to-date and secure? Sign up for a free demo of Land Gorilla, the most powerful construction loan management software available on the market.
