StoneRidge Lending is a private lending company in the GTA, focused primarily on residential lending, first and second mortgages. They have a small team of two people and just over six million dollars under administration. For any small private lender who might think that they don’t need to automate their operations, StoneRidge’s case is a perfect example of how software can propel your growth, regardless of the company’s initial size.

Jordan Wyborn, the Mortgage Administrator at StoneRidge Lending, takes care of the company’s daily operations. This includes all of the end-to-end communication from investors to borrowers, as well as document collection and deal fulfillment.

Prior to automating the lending business, StoneRidge was running most of its operations manually. There was no way to import loan applications, each Commitment required a new Word document, and all the LTV calculations had to be done by someone as well. On top of all that, Jordan also had to write out investor cheques and visit a number of banks to deposit them, wasting hours of her time.

With all the routine manual work, StoneRidge also used another lending software that didn’t help them run the business efficiently. If you have a piece of software (especially one that’s been on the market for decades) but still have to perform even the most simple processes by hand—this is a major red flag that the software is not working for you the way it should.

In addition to having to do all the payments by cheque, the ledger organization in the software didn’t allow for proper reporting and tracking of funds, outstanding payments, per diems, and more. StoneRidge was ready to look for a product that would significantly increase efficiency in their workflow and processes.

Mortgage Automator was the right fit for StoneRidge’s requirements. The only brief moment of hesitation they had was the price point, and that’s completely understandable for a small business. They quickly realized that the software was worth every penny.

Mortgage Automator worked with StoneRidge to create customized versions of their automated documents. They had perfected the wording of their Commitment and wanted to keep on using it in the system. Automator was able to tailor it to StoneRidge’s requirements, down to specific terms they requested.

Now, the StoneRidge team can rely on Mortgage Automator to take care of their routine processes. “Recently Mortgage Automator has implemented a feature that allows us to pay out our per diem interest to our investors as well, so it’s really just taken a lot of work off of our desks in order to have everything automated for our investors,” Jordan is happy about not having to go from bank to bank anymore.

However, the benefits go beyond automation alone. StoneRidge was also able to eliminate a lot of confusion within the team. Using the Status tab in the Automator system, they can easily track the progress of each loan, allowing them to keep a much more organized workflow. They can also see the progress and the workload of each team member, thus keeping themselves aligned internally.

In order to keep their operations streamlined and connected all in one place, StoneRidge got their accountant to use Mortgage Automator as well. “It’s a really friendly front-facing system for our accountant to go in and see where our money is located for the year-end audit. Whereas with our previous system, it was not web-based and this was quite complicated to be able to communicate back and forth for those year-end reports,” Jordan told us.

Trevor Daly, one of the StoneRidge’s founders, used to spend a lot of time dealing with the logistics of the business, putting Commitments together, and being busy with the day-to-day processes. With Mortgage Automator on board, he can allocate most of his time to bringing in more investors and underwriting the deals. 

Since automating their private lending business with Mortgage Automator, StoneRidge was able to save a lot of time and resources. They can now focus on the growing deal flow and faster turnaround time.