Improve your home equity lending strategy for multi-family properties

According to data from ICE's March Mortgage Monitor, homeowners withdrew $52 billion in equity during the fourth quarter of 2025, bringing full-year equity withdrawals to $205 billion — the highest annual total since 2022. With nearly $17 trillion in total equity held by U.S. homeowners, lenders and borrowers are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.

For lenders, this starts with giving borrowers clarity and confidence from the very beginning of the loan process. Putting the right information, such as home value and tappable equity, in front of borrowers early helps build trust and communication and speeds up the decision-making process throughout the origination journey.

ICE’s Validate helps make this possible by putting the control directly in the hands of the borrower. Validate is an intuitive mobile solution that combines computer vision technology, a condition-adjusted automated valuation model (AVM) and user-provided photos to determine a property’s up-to-date value and available equity. Users can capture real-time photos of the subject property as early as loan application, or at any time of the origination lifecycle, resulting in a faster process, better-informed borrowers and a more efficient path to close.

And now, Validate extends these benefits to support home equity lending on multi-family properties. This provides lenders with a simplified way to account for each unit and gives borrowers a clearer picture of the equity they can access across their entire property.

To provide insights as early as possible in the origination process, mortgage lenders need fast, objective property valuations. With Validate, lenders can secure a verified view of the property’s current condition by using the real-time, GPS-tracked property photos captured by the homeowner, tenant or real estate agent.

When an AVM is needed, Validate uses ICE’s Property Valuation Model (PVM) to select the most appropriate AVM based on the property’s geography, property type and living area. This yields a reliable estimate of value that meets the definition of an evaluation and supports the latest Interagency Guidelines. Validate also provides property condition using the standard appraisal condition and quality rating six-point scales. From there, it provides a value range for the property, a similarity score compared to other properties in the market, AVM confidence scores and an estimate of available equity. This information is compiled within Validate and delivered to the lender in a simple, comprehensive report.

Processing home equity loans for multi-family properties has historically required managing multiple property inspections and reports. Validate simplifies this complex workflow by consolidating everything into a single, cohesive process and report.

Validate drives efficiency for multi-family unit valuations by providing:

Home equity lending for multi-family properties doesn’t have to be a slow, manual process. By equipping homeowners and tenants with a tool to document property condition and quality on their own schedules, lenders can gather critical information faster, reduce reliance on third-party inspectors and deliver a clearer picture of tappable equity.

Validate provides the objective data required to make swift decisions, help maintain regulatory compliance and deliver a better borrower experience. When used as a first step in home equity workflows, whether for single- or multi-family units, Validate helps lenders save time and money by surfacing borrower and subject property information earlier in the mortgage loan process.