New ICE app integration lets homeowners initiate home equity loan requests and perform self-guided property valuations

According to ICE’s Mortgage Monitor, tappable equity – the amount a homeowner can borrow against while retaining a conservative 20% equity stake in the property – has grown by more than $5.5 trillion since the fourth quarter of 2019, due to a more than 50 percent rise in home prices. Nevertheless, due to a number of factors, including elevated interest rates, borrowers have been withdrawing equity at less than half the decade average over the past 10 quarters, resulting in an unutilized half trillion dollars that might have otherwise flowed back into the broader economy.

A new integration between ICE Servicing Digital, the web- and mobile-native consumer engagement app, and its Validate property valuation tool, can make equity extraction easier by giving servicers’ customers a current estimate of how much tappable equity they have in their homes, and the ability to proactively complete a self-guided valuation of their property.

ICE’s application programming interface (API) can make it easier for homeowners to access their equity by providing an automated, underwriter-gradable home valuation from Validate using Servicing Digital without having to start a formal application. This gives the homeowner a quick understanding of their available housing wealth while simultaneously signaling potential interest in equity products to their servicer. Should they decide to proceed with a home equity loan or line of credit application, much of the required valuation process will have already been completed.

“Most homeowners do not have a complete understanding of their housing wealth,” said Tim Bowler, President of ICE Mortgage Technology. “This integration between Validate and Servicing Digital aims to help address that information gap by informing households of how much equity they have. In addition, these tools fully integrate with the same banking app households use to manage their mortgage so consumers can quickly and easily explore the current and condition-specific value of their home.”

With Servicing Digital, fully integrated with MSP®, ICE’s loan servicing system, servicers can use configurable logic that will conditionally serve their customers with a tile in the app to alert them if they have useable equity within their home. Customers can then tap on that tile to begin the valuation process with Validate.

Validate is a consumer-centric property-valuation app that guides a homeowner to capture interior and exterior images of their home and property, with geofencing and timestamps helping verify location accuracy. Computer vision analyzes the photos and provides a condition and quality rating based on the same standards used by real estate appraisers. By leveraging these new real-time insights, Validate can deliver a more precise condition-adjusted Automated Valuation Model (AVM) to provide lenders and homeowners with a more credible, objective and transparent value of a property.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 – Statements in this press release regarding ICE's business that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see ICE's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors in ICE's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, as filed with the SEC on February 8, 2024.