Shining a Spotlight on Assumable Loans

You may have seen the news already, but we’re excited to announce a strategic partnership with BeachesMLS to identify and flag assumable loans, right at the source, when an agent is entering a new listing into the MLS. These loans let qualified buyers take over a seller’s existing mortgage at its original interest and terms, often far lower than today’s market rate, potentially saving thousands of dollars.

Assumable loans are one of the keys to solving the home affordability crisis in the US, and our partnership helps shine a bright spotlight on this underutilized financing option.

Like Duolingo for Loans

Assumable loans are a long forgotten language that nobody speaks anymore: Listing agents don’t think to ask about them, and Sellers don’t know if they have one, even if they were asked.

Since assumable loans have to be manually flagged by a listing agent when they’re being entered into the MLS, this type of loan is effectively invisible to consumers and their agents. They’re not on the MLS, broker sites, or web portals, even though 20–25% of all on-market homes with a mortgage have an assumable loan.

There are tens of thousands of killer assumable deals on the market everyday that nobody even notices.

We were promised jetpacks

The RetroRate API is built on our proprietary database of assumable loan information, and provides up-to-the-minute access to mortgage rates, loan terms, and interest data. We compare these assumable loans against the prime rate multiple times a day, and assign a RetroMatch score so agent subscribers can have an at-a-glance look at how good a loan it is.

As an agent enters a new home into the MLS, our system flags these new listings and helps provide marketing suggestions so that the loan itself can be highlighted front and center. We also augment the MLS data fields themselves so that searches for assumable inventory within the MLS return a real look at what’s available.

In other words, if BeachesMLS has 5% awareness of assumable loan inventory, we augment the other 95%, and then provide a jetpack to amp up transaction volume for their 43k subscribers.

And we do this from within the same systems that member subscribers are familiar with and used to.

Stay Tuned

Here at RetroRate, we see this as the first in a series of creative partnerships built on the RetroRate platform that help empower MLSs, their agent subscribers, and their clients.

We really enjoyed partnering with our forward thinking and technology savvy friends at BeachesMLS on this special launch, and can’t wait to see more people getting into homes at a time of record un-affordability. Thank you also to the RetroRate and FBS teams for pushing to make it happen so quickly.

We can’t wait to show you more!