Intelligence is the difference between facts and knowledge, between information and understanding. Although artificial intelligence and machine learning are popular buzzwords in the mortgage industry today, truly machine intelligence based solutions are still a rarity in our space. Fortunately for lenders and servicers, Quantarium is bucking that trend.
The company approaches real estate from a distinctly scientific perspective, reflecting its founders’ backgrounds in high-end technology, quantum physics and computational genetics. As co-founder and Quantarium CEO Clement Ifrim explained, the company’s understanding of the market and its development of solutions is different from other companies not just in degree, but in kind.
“The word quanta describes the smallest entity involved in any physical interaction. Similarly, our initiative from the first days of our company was to use all this data — the smallest pieces of information — meshed with machine intelligence to provide the most accurate solutions on the market,” Ifrim said.
Quantarium’s robust artificial intelligence is a result of the methods the company leveraged from the beginning, applying machine learning solutions, such as neural networks, evolutionary programming and genetic algorithms to understand both individual assets and local market dynamics within the housing market. The company’s ambitious goal was to discover the DNA of real estate by mapping out its chromosomes — the up to hundreds of property characteristics of each asset — and determining how their proportional usefulness, along with the local market environment defined its expressed phenotype, impacting the estimated value..
Using this approach, Quantarium can credibly claim true AI, as its models behave like living systems.
“Our valuation system is constantly evolving and learning. Combined with our unparalleled data lake, our valuations get more accurate with each new run. Similarly, with our portfolio services, we are generating predictive models that get better every single day,” Ifrim said.
Quantarium’s offerings include its automated valuation model, QVM, valuation services, portfolio services, and a data and search platform, which was developed by mathematicians, scientists and computer architects — many of whom formerly worked on Microsoft’s enterprise services.
Romi Mahajan, the commercial head of the company, said, “Quantarium is a ‘meaningful AI’ company — we use AI not for some abstruse solution in search of a problem but instead to create markets and enhancements in the world’s largest asset class, namely residential real estate.”
For servicers in this low-volume purchase market, Quantarium’s portfolio services are especially critical as part of a proactive strategy to retain customers. For the last several years, servicers could count on moving borrowers into refinance loans and having enough new customers that they weren’t concerned about retention. Today, servicers need portfolio solutions that identify ongoing opportunities to engage homeowners as they contemplate selling, refinancing or taking cash out — before they start looking.
With Quantarium, servicers can leverage automated vigilance to see market activity on any loan in their portfolio, giving them the ability to contact borrowers with new offers. They can also gain insight into a borrower’s current status — such as whether they have paid off a loan and still live in the house, sold the property or refinanced with another lender. It also surfaces new lien activities.
Additionally, Quantarium’s best-in-class portfolio services can identify borrowers who are likely to list their property, or refinance.
“We can look at a borrower and say, ‘Do we think this person because of age, job, age of children, etc. is a good cash-out candidate? Or maybe a consolidation candidate?’ Servicers can take a segment of their portfolio and send a very specific message to that group,” Ifrim said.
Brian Mushaney, Quantarium’s business development vice president commented further, “Leveraging AI models, allows us to move loan loss beyond simple analysis, so our customers can further understand attrition from their lost customers’ loan purpose perspective and respond accordingly.”
Servicers and investors can also use Quantarium’s geocentric property reports to spot neighborhood trends in sales prices and demography, view comprehensive transaction history and get sales comps.
“We provide servicers with a statistical analysis of what’s happening in a borrower’s neighborhood, so they can stay in meaningful contact with the borrower, edified to both their individual and market context, all the time. They might see that homes in a particular micro market have increased beyond certain thresholds and now they can let the borrower know that, current transforming asset and market circumstance have made them candidates for products within the servicers portfolio that can optimize the borrower’s position,” said Malcolm Cannon, Quantarium’s chief operating officer.
Quantarium leverages data from more than a dozen data services, but it also creates new data all the time, using machine learning methods, such as computer vision to add property characteristics and then understand how they impact quality and value, expanding the reach of its intelligent systems.
“We begin by sitting down with our customers to find out where their pain points are, then we get our AI scientists together to figure out the solution. If you have a question, we have the data to answer it,” Ifrim said.
“We’re so excited about the potency of what Quantarium does — it’s unparalleled,” Cannon said. “We are working with the best tech companies in the world to stay on top of innovation and provide the best possible services for our clients.”
