Are millions hiding in your operation?

I've had the good fortune to visit with a number of the top executives at Mortgage Cadence, the mortgage technology arm of Accenture. Dan Green, in particular, has a very well-developed idea of what it takes to succeed as a mortgage lender. That's probably because he was an originator before he joined the LOS maker, first in operations, then leading both operations and marketing teams and now head of all marketing for Mortgage Cadence.

Green knows a thing or two about what it takes to be what he calls a "high performance lender," partly because he was one when he worked on that side of the business, but also because he is a self-proclaimed data nerd and has been studying lender performance, in detail, for at least the last six years.

Dan has been sharing what he's learned in the Mortgage Cadence annual benchmarking study on the company's blog. Most recently, his team posted a piece that basically claims many lenders have somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million hiding in their operations, mostly in the form of lost productivity. Green believes this because that's about the difference he has seen between the cost to close of the average lender in his study and the high performance lenders over the last six years. Clearly, the industry's best lenders know something the rest do not.

To find out more, check out the Mortgage Cadence blog and find out if you have an extra $3 million laying around your shop.