Benutech’s Brian Fox on a blind spot in reverse mortgage servicing

Risk management is of utmost importance to reverse mortgage servicers — and Brian Fox has pinpointed a problem hiding in plain sight. Fox, the chief revenue officer at Benutech, recently published an analysis of nearly 35,000 active reverse mortgages. It revealed widespread mismatches in title records, including unrecorded transfers and occupancy errors that servicers never identified. Benutech maintains a national property data file that’s updated daily. It covers every property transaction, mortgage lien and assessor record in the country. The company’s flagship products serve the title industry but can also monitor servicing portfolios for risks. The reverse mortgage study was essentially a self-initiated side project that surfaced some alarming statistics. “It’s kind of wild that you can get a reverse mortgage, you could add somebody to the title, (the borrower) could be gone from that property and the lender has no idea,” Fox said in an interview with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily. High percentage of problematic loans A common risk scenario involving reverse mortgages, according to the Benutech analysis, comes years after origination. A borrower might add their child to...