How Spreadsheets Add Risk to Construction Lending

Millennials are entering the housing market with a force, yet low inventory across the country is stalling their dreams of homeownership. Now is the time for lenders to either begin or ramp up their construction loan programs. These niche loan products are a great addition to any book of business, but to be successful you have to be able to manage and service the loan after it closes.

Post close actions have traditionally been done with spreadsheets. This method, while fairly understood, is actually limiting and prone to formula errors. Additionally, spreadsheets naturally reach a tipping point in a team’s ability to scale and share reportable data with management and others in the organization. This puts loan completion in jeopardy and creates more risk to the lender.

The Limits of Spreadsheets to Manage Construction Lending
Spreadsheets can only do what they are designed to do—no more and no less. As your program grows, you are bound to reach the point where a spreadsheet is no longer functionally efficient and becomes a risky way to manage your pipeline.

• Limited Visibility Into the Life of the Loan: Each loan has many different data points and touches over time, and housing them in a spreadsheet is basically burying important and vital information every time the loan is touched. It’s nearly impossible to see history, anticipate the future—and most importantly, clearly see problems before they arise. Spreadsheets force a reactive instead of a proactive method, which means a lender who is using spreadsheets is always playing catch-up.
• No Reporting: Can you open up the spreadsheet right now and easily and accurately report on the pipeline, draw reports or consultant reports? The answer is probably no. And what do you do when you need to produce 1098 or 1099 reports? How do spreadsheets support these requirements? Getting your 1098s or 1099s from spreadsheets is a tedious, manual process prone to error. If you have a good quantity of construction loans, this is a large undertaking, and is difficult to scale. As you consider spreadsheets, consider the additional work that those spreadsheets will cost you over time.
• A Finite Number Of Loans One Person Can Manage: Spreadsheets require a lot of time to properly manage one loan, and we have found that dedicated and experienced construction loan administrators can typically manage 35 to 50 loans using spreadsheets at one time. Any more than this usually adds to poor customer service.
• Drains In-house Resources: If your program is doing well and your origination volume is growing, team members are limited in scale before a new hire must be acquired to take on more loans. Throwing bodies at the problem is not the best solution.
• Location, Location, Location: Spreadsheets, no matter if they are stored on the cloud or on desktops, are still accessed by individual devices. You are now limited to these single failure points. What are the implications of losing this data, or the individual that knows how it works?
• No Tracking: A spreadsheet does not offer tracking, task automation, complaint management, event monitoring, risk analysis and draw validations to ensure that the loan is meeting all of its milestones and risk requirements. As a workaround, lenders turn to the sticky note to help them keep track of important dates and actions. We all know the ineffective nature of this system, especially as key factors such as deadlines for draws, inspections, liens or permit expirations often get lost in the sticky note shuffle.
• No Compliance Monitoring: Spreadsheets cannot keep you in compliance with government regulations, state statutes, loan program requirements, internal compliance, in-house policies/procedures or industry best practices. In order to maintain strict compliance, spreadsheets require constant vigilance. This may be their biggest limitation.

If Not Spreadsheets, Then What?
Spreadsheets just don’t cut it for construction loan management. Lenders who want to increase revenue while adding fewer additional resources need a digital construction loan management solution. Digital solutions reduce risk, improve efficiencies, allow scale and provide a better customer experience. Not to mention it keeps track of every small, yet critical, part of the construction loan. Never again will you be questioning if you are over-dispersing funds. Digital solutions, especially those that are cloud-based, can alleviate all the limitations of spreadsheets and the tipping point will be a thing of the past. Once you are running on this new level, you can bring more revenue and smart growth to your organization.