Could ChatGPT shake up the mortgage industry?

CMP Featuring Taylor Little May 4, 2023

Could ChatGPT shake up the mortgage industry?

This article was originally published on Canadian Mortgage Professional.

It’s taken the world by storm in 2023 with the potential to bring about a radical transformation in the workplace and beyond – but could the use of AI (artificial intelligence) models like ChatGPT become widespread in the mortgage industry?

The platform has seen extraordinary popularity in recent months, racking up more than 100 million users between December 2022 and this February, according to the latest data. When it comes to the mortgage space, the possible advantages of deploying AI are limitless, according to a leading CEO.

Taylor Little of Neighbourhood Holdings said at a recent virtual event hosted by the lender that his team was already exploring ways to harness AI to complement its daily work, with its usage set to become increasingly commonplace in the coming years.

“We’ve built a tool that we’ve integrated into Slack that’s kind of useful, just an internal tool to help teams find data. I do think it’ll be an interesting part of most businesses going forward, and I’m really curious to see what more we can do with it,” he said.

“We spent a lot of time developing some in-house tech, really investing in productivity and the tech stack and brought on a really great development engineer to help us with that – and all of a sudden, we get this new tool that I think can do a lot.”

The ability of AI platforms like ChatGPT to effortlessly comb through data and extract relevant information could be a huge asset to businesses in the mortgage space, according to Little.

“Even from our perspective, thinking about things like using it to help with underwriting, helping it with recognition of data – whether it’s big datasets on delinquency, big datasets on new origination, sales, all that kind of stuff,” he said. “I think it’d be really interesting to deploy, and we’re just at the really early start of that trend.”

How technology is set to impact the world of real estate in the near future

Another participant in the discussion, CIBC’s deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal, said it was important to embrace the technology and appreciate its potential for seismic positive change.

“We should not resist it. I know that many people resist it, especially in education. I say the opposite,” he said. “Never fight technology. Change the way you think about technology… The students that are now in school will be in the labour force until 2060. Can you imagine what kind of technology they will be using? We definitely cannot resist it. And that will have winners and losers, like any other thing.”

Technology and innovation could play important roles in helping alleviate Canada’s housing supply crisis, Tal said, a further reason to welcome change for the better.

“If we talk about supply, it’s not just about more labour because we don’t have enough labour,” he said. “It’s also building differently. I’m talking about factory-made houses. I’m talking about 3D. I’m talking about different ways to use technology to ease the pressure on the market. I think that’s the direction we’re going to go as well.”

What other ways are companies utilizing AI in the mortgage and real estate industries?

In the UK, ONP Group – a legal services provider to the residential property and remortgage markets – recently integrated its systems with ChatGPT, a move it said would remove administrative tasks and enhance customer journeys.

The company’s chief technology officer Andrew Taylor said investing in modern technology like ChatGPT was a “key part” of its strategy to remove administration tasks for case managers, allowing it to set a “new standard” in the legal space.

In Canada, Intellifi vice president of innovation Richard Paterson recently highlighted to CMP the growing influence of AI on the mortgage space.

“The recent improvements in AI show the need to be able to quickly adopt for systems and processes to be able to take advantage of some of these things that could now be automated, that perhaps were previously manual,” he said.