The Digital Experience Has Improved 60% of the Consumer Mortgage Process

Alex Leduc, CEO of Canadian-based proptech Perch with the goal of empowering people throughout the entire home buying process.

If you’ve tried to buy a house in the past few years (or just browsed a real estate marketplace for fun), you may have noticed that housing prices and the demand for real estate have been soaring at a record-breaking pace, and while rising interest rates have cooled the market somewhat, it’s still harder than it’s ever been to afford a home for many people.

At Perch, our mission is to solve two distinct problems - housing affordability and building wealth over time through homeownership. Many people want to get into the housing market, but they don’t necessarily have clarity on where to start and how to leverage the equity in the right way once they’ve purchased a home. To be involved throughout the real estate journey, Perch’s team and analytics platform simplifies the mortgage application process, prepare a path to owning the right home, and educates consumers on how to leverage their home equity.

What are the Problems Facing Real Estate in 2022?

Due to a variety of factors, we’re seeing declining homeownership rates for younger Canadians, and they’re seriously concerned about ever being able to buy their ideal home.

In fact, 77% of Canadians polled in 2020 expressed a lack of confidence in being able to afford the home they want. (source)

While homebuyers are struggling to get approved on their mortgage, homeowners aren’t leveraging their property’s full potential.

40% of Canadian net worth is tied up in real estate, and many enter retirement with very few assets other than their home. This results in punitive forms of financing such as home equity lines of credit, reverse mortgages, private mortgages, and more. (source)

With traditional lenders, homebuyers are facing lengthy waits, a lack of transparency, and they aren’t presented with the tools necessary for them to make informed decisions. In the digital era, there’s no reason that getting a mortgage and buying a home can’t be a completely user-friendly experience, with all the processes in the hands of the buyer. Automation can solve a lot of the issues present in the approval process, and the internet has opened up access to educational resources for everyone.

How is technology changing the mortgage industry?

Although technology makes for a competitive and efficient market, I still view real estate as a relationship-based industry with an indispensable human element.

The digital experience has certainly improved 60% of the typical consumer mortgage process, but people still need to be involved (and that probably won’t change for some time).

Throughout the mortgage application and ownership process, people feel more secure knowing that there is a person on the other side of the screen with their best interest in mind.

With that being said, one of our largest advantages over our competitors has been in automating 65% of the mortgage approval process.

What this has allowed us to do is to transfer most of the savings from that over to value for the user. Our developer team has built a number of tools designed to maximize value for our users, generating property value estimates in real time, and offering personalized insights into where they can save money as a homeowner or homebuyer.

The goal with Perch was to create an ecosystem that looked to serve the client first, not the interests of those involved. In this ecosystem, being able to create a collaborative network of the right professional and overlay analytics in areas where it’s needed increases the likelihood of a customer making an informed decision and achieving their goals.

We go beyond just offering mortgages, we have the platform in Canada that empowers users to optimize their path to homeownership and then maximize the wealth they have as homeowners. Our focus on balancing technology and expert advice enables us to create a better outcome for everyone involved. Everything we do is ultimately around building a real estate ecosystem that empowers users to make better decisions. This is via a combination of advanced analytics, vetted professionals and complementary product verticals.

The ideal state of our platform involves a user going through Perch for every real estate transaction knowing that they’ll save the most time and money, get the best advice and be guided fairly from start to finish with their best interests in mind.

Looking toward 2023 and beyond, we’re excited to witness open banking legislation’s impact on increased innovation and options in the lending space. Also interesting is the shifting dynamic between financing and realtors as the importance of where realtors seek their financing continues to grow in the competitive marketplace.

More About Perch

Perch is a tech company focused on empowering Canadians on their homeownership journey to build wealth through real estate, by transforming financial data into actionable insights which can help optimize a buyer’s path to homeownership. Once a homeowner, we enable them to build wealth by putting their home equity to work. All of this is made possible through a highly skilled network of professionals and our proprietary analytics platform.

Founded in 2018, we’ve grown from 3 employees to 20 in the past 3 years, and since our first launch we’ve learned a lot to tailor our product for users.

Over 80% of our revenue has been completely organic or through user referrals. Going forward our goal is to expand and increase our userbase, focusing on building a library of content through which to teach people about the mortgage process and homeownership, whether they end up getting a mortgage with us or not.

Our product is currently available to Canadians, and they can read more about us at__myperch.io__, it takes a few minutes to set up a profile.