Business Spotlight: MoPartners.com accelerates home loan process

The kids are sick, your spouse is cranky, work has been a nightmare and on top of it all, you're looking for a new house. Before you go house hunting, however, you'll have to take time for one more thing applying for and getting a home loan.

Rather than spending Saturday meeting with a banker, the prospective home buyer can log on to the World Wide Web, fill out a secure, online home loan application, and find out if they've been approved within 24 hours.

Sound too good to be true?

"It's not," said Kevin Heckemeyer, an ambitious 27-year-old entrepreneur who founded Mortgage Partners Inc., an online mortgage company commonly known as MoPartners.com. "This is the wave of the future for mortgage lending. Wespeed, conven-iencegreatrates."

Heckemeyer started the company in 1999. Drawing from his background in communications, sales and mortgage finance, he initially worked from his home while developing the company's Web site, www.mopartners.com. The site, which was designed and is hosted by NetBelieve Inc., took more than six months to develop.

Heckemeyer didn't have an established customer base or any affiliates when the site launched in July 2000. However, he said, he knew he had a good idea, and he believed that his "build it and they will come" philosophy would ultimately pay off. It did.

Within months of the site's launch, he moved into office space at 313 Park Central West, just above the Springfield Business Journal's offices, and hired five employees. He also began building relationships with local real estate companies and Realtors.

"Realtors can earn an origination fee, and the automated tracking system provides increased customer service for prospective home buyers," Heckemeyer said. "It's a win-win situation for everyone. We get business, the Realtors earn a little money and prospective home owners get loans far faster, and often at better interest rates, than they would if they went to a bank or another mortgage company."

Currently, MoPartners.com offers a "Superfast Guarantee." Under the terms and conditions of the guarantee, MoPartners.com will pay up to $300 for a home appraisal if it is unable to close a customer's home loan within 10 business days from the date a real estate contract is received. The same 10-day guarantee applies once MoPartners.com receives an application to refinance a home. According to Heckemeyer, the average turnaround time to close a home loan is 20 to 30 days.

Normally, a home loan can be a monster of paperwork, Heckemeyer said. "You accumulate all these papers, and then everything gets entered into a computer where it's analyzed. We've cut out most of the paperwork by automating various parts of the loan process, and everything is done in real time, which speeds things up as well."

Currently Heckemeyer and his partner Ron Smithson, who became a minority owner in January 2000, are working to increase the company's market share, and the two have beefed up the advertising budget for 2001. Their goal 25 percent of the local Springfield home loan and refinancing market is ambitious, considering the number of banks, credit unions and mortgage companies that do business in the area.

Heckemeyer and Smithson also are looking to expand beyond the Springfield area by taking the company's business model and applying it to real estate markets in Joplin and Kansas City. The company also has applied for mortgage licenses in 25 other states, most of which are in the Midwest.

The company's Web site also is expanding. Online customers can browse through an extensive database of real estate listings, take a virtual home tour and apply for a home loan, all in a single Internet session. Other offerings at the site, such as autos and auto loans, and classified ads for autos, boats and other items, are in development.