Reverse Market Insight expands loan qualifying tool to include Smartfi proprietary products

Loan analysis and technology firm Reverse Market Insight (RMI) on Wednesday announced an expansion of its Reverse Qualifier tool, giving reverse mortgage originators the opportunity to price and model the benefits of proprietary products from SmartFi Home Loans alongside existing capabilities for Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs).

RMI initially launched Reverse Qualifier in October 2025, offering demonstrations to attendees at the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) Annual Meeting. At that time, the tool only covered traditional HECM loans, HECM-to-HECM refinances and HECM for Purchase transactions.

Roughly nine months later, the product has become more inclusive. RMI President John Lunde and director of client relations Jon McCue spoke with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) about the benefits of the platform, noting that plans to include more private-label offerings from other leading reverse mortgage lenders are in the works.

RMI spent more than a year building the Reverse Qualifier tool, which uses some of the same technology that powers its HECM Loan Comparison and Underwriting Tool (HLCUT). While Reverse Qualifier largely targets loan officers in the forward mortgage space who are less familiar with reverse mortgages, it has also proven valuable to experienced reverse LOs as they model loan options for clients and seek clarity on compensation.

C2 Financial Corp., a top-five broker in the HECM space, has been using RMI’s tool across a swath of its roughly 1,000 originators.

According to Shain Urwin, C2’s national reverse mortgage director, it functions similarly to Optimal Blue‘s Loansifter as brokers can compare compensation levels and identify the best deal for borrowers across multiple lenders — including Finance of America, Mutual of Omaha Mortgage and Traditional Mortgage Acceptance Corp.

“No. 1 is the simplicity and flow — it makes it so easy, it’s very simple, it flows well. Two is, I like how you can illustrate and drop off different things — like the fees and the insurance — through different parts of this little pie chart they built that allows you to tell the story and add the layers of the story as you need to,” Urwin said.

“Really, the biggest takeaway for us was the fact that you could see your revenue. You can see as an LO, do I have a deal, am I going to be compensated on this deal and what is that compensation?”

Earlier this year, REVERSE plus launched a similar integration for its ANALYZER PRO platform, allowing originators to model HECM options and Smartfi proprietary products in a single system.

Intuitive interface

Reverse Qualifier is able to compare loan options side by side for easier explanations to clients, and LOs can filter options to show only the products that best match an individual borrower’s scenario.

The dashboard-style tool includes the ability to drag and drop products to compare features. Users can see which loan option has the highest maximum proceeds over a specific term and can automatically flag key benefits such as the lowest closing cost.

By entering some basic borrower information — including the property address, estimated home value and any required debt payoffs — the technology can determine whether a homeowner qualifies for a given product. It shows the value of a reverse mortgage by modeling how a line of credit can grow over time based on home price projections and potential voluntary borrower payments.

Along with loan officers, the tool is designed for use by closed loan sellers and issuers of HECM Mortgage-Backed Securities (HMBS).

“We’re trying to keep it super simple and boil it back to the real-world implications of what this loan does for you versus this (other) loan,” Lunde said. “How much equity do I have at the end of 10 years and how much cash can I get access to? And it’s dramatically different in some of these situations between the different loan products.”

Proprietary channel growth

Reverse Qualifier is one of the tools that aims to complement reverse-specific loan origination systems like QuantumReverse. It arrives at a time when private-label reverse mortgages are in growth mode and account for a larger market share by dollar volume than federally insured HECMs.

Smartfi has leaned into proprietary offerings through its Choice loan. While endorsement data for individual companies in the proprietary channel is not publicly available, Smartfi was the nation’s 15th-largest lender by HECM count through the first five months of the year with 120 endorsements, according to RMI.

“We are thrilled to expand the reach of Choice, our industry-leading proprietary reverse mortgage loan program, through the launch of Reverse Qualifier. Smartfi believes reverse mortgages should be a part of all retirement planning conversations, and new technology solutions such as this make that possible,” Kim Smith, Smartfi’s senior vice president of wholesale lending, told RMD in a statement.

Urwin said the tool has made a difference for C2’s forward loan officers who rarely do reverse mortgages. The company created a “Does My Client Qualify?” button on its internal site, which routes LOs into Reverse Qualifier. Additionally, Urwin said he uses it to present to every client as he seeks to break down closing costs, Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance and line-of-credit details in digestible fashion.

The platform also has a “short to close” feature that lets all parties know when a borrower doesn’t qualify for a given scenario, highlighting the exact shortfall in red letters. LOs have the ability to adjust their margin downward to find a workable scenario.

“In the broker world, we have to disclose what we make on a loan,” Urwin said, adding that he estimates the company’s typical margin at roughly 1.8% versus an industry average of 2.25% to 2.5%. “The lenders don’t, so being a principal agent or closed loan seller, you could be making 10 grand more than I’m making on the loan — which many of them are, because they charge higher margins.”

McCue said he feels vindicated having top originators in the reverse space adopt the tool and find value in it.

“Prior to Shain signing on with us for this, he had a 45-minute pricing video people had to watch on how to price a loan,” McCue said. “It took us about two years to really get to this — the actual loan revenue piece.”