A “dearth of data” in the reverse mortgage sector is being addressed in a collaboration between the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association and MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) – an 11-year-old electronic registry for the mortgage finance industry, which will use MISMO (Mortgage Standards Industry Maintenance Organization), for the initiative.

MERS manages MISMO, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The “dearth,” as described by NRMLA’s president, Peter Bell, is the result of “individual players’ failure to share data” with one another, he tells RMD. A committee within the association is discussing data standardization, says member Steve Irwin, an independent consultant and former first vice-president of servicing operations at Financial Freedom Senior Funding Corporation.

Data collection design is “in the embryonic stage now,” Irwin tells RMD, noting that when the agreement with MERS is finalized by year’s end, “it will enable a standard delivery of information from application through the life of a loan to the end of a loan.” Data will be collected from – among others – title appraisers, title insurers, regulators and investors, according to Irwin. IBIS Capital is said to be working with NRMLA and MERS/MISMO, using analytical software to develop more than 1,000 data fields around a reverse mortgage.

MERS reportedly plans to pour this reverse mortgage data into a fraud prevention database it plans to jointly introduce with Interthinx.

Neil J. Morse has been a communications professional working in the mortgage finance industry for more than a decade, currently specializing in the reverse mortgage sector. He can be reached at nmorse@morsecommunications.com