An Internet Idea With A Real Lightbulb Behind It by Lesley Hensell
With everyone and their dog throwing a real estate site on the Web and hoping it sticks, few new Internet ventures are anywhere close to what I would call impressive. But at long last, a commercial real estate mortgage site deserves kudos. CapitalThinking.com not only has a cool looking interface and advanced loan technology, but also has developed a $70 million pipeline of prospective loans to prove its value in the marketplace. The site, launched this week, is touted to have combined proprietary Internet technology with experienced real estate professionals to “bring unmatched speed and efficiency to the process of obtaining commercial real estate loans.” About $250 billion in commercial real estate mortgages are written in the United States each year. CapitalThinking, which employs a robust staff of 30, spent February digging up $70 million in loan requests to ensure the site would be prepared to handle live deals at launch. CapitalThinking estimates it will reduce the amount of time required to originate and close a loan by up to 60 percent. The $70 million in deals already underway at CapitalThinking represents a mix of asset types and loan sizes. The site design is user-friendly, simple and hip, making it accessible to even the most techno-phobic real estate professional. Fees are touted as being half the typical fee charged by a traditional broker. CapitalThinking charges 0.5 percent for the first $7.5 million, 0.375 percent for amounts between $7.5 million and $12.5 million, and 0.125 percent for loans of more than $12.5 million. “CapitalThinking’s sole mission is to help lenders, brokers and borrowers close commercial mortgages with greater speed and efficiency,” explained Heather Shively, co-founder and CEO. “Ours is the first commercial mortgage business to apply both online and traditional methodology to complete loan transactions.” For brokers and borrowers, CapitalThinking’s technology is aimed at streamlining and speeding the documentation process, increasing production for brokers and lowering costs for borrowers. For lenders, CapitalThinking seeks to deliver quality preliminary underwriting on transactions tailored to their specific requirements. The company’s proprietary document management technology injects a great amount of control over the process for all categories of users. “It’s easy to underestimate the technological challenges associated with originating and closing online commercial mortgages,” said John Petrovski, group president of Heller Financial’s real estate lending group and one of the lenders on the CapitalThinking Web site. “It’s important to us that CapitalThinking has developed its technology in-house so they can adapt more quickly and appropriately to our needs and the needs of the industry.” The company has launched with a geographically diverse roster of banks, insurance companies, conduits and pension funds, including JP Morgan, CIBC, GMAC, ARCS Commercial Mortgage and Capital Lease Funding. Eventually, the company would like to provide access to between 50 and 70 lenders. “Mass e-mailing a borrower-produced loan application to 500 lenders doesn't work,” Shively said. “Borrowers won’t get the best rates when a lender thinks their chances of acquiring and closing a loan are practically zero. Lenders need to spend a little time reviewing a deal to offer the best quote. We give them the incentive to do that, while offering our prospective borrowers and brokers the complete spectrum of lending types from the highest-quality capital sources in the country,” Shively said. One of the coolest features is that users can choose any format to provide documentation to CapitalThinking, whether it be fax, overnight mail or emailed documents. Fees are not assessed until a quote is accepted by the user. If the site works as touted, real estate pros should be loving the Web more than ever. | 
