Purpose
The Home Counselor tool has
one simple goal, to automate the population of providers on the Home Counseling
Provider List in Encompass. Once activated, this tool will automatically fill
in the providers within 500 miles of the primary borrower’s current residence
after it has been filled in. This can expedite the loan process by automating
what previously required manual entry or at the very least, manually accessing Encompass’s
tool to download the list.
Activation
1. Installation of
the Home Counselor tool is done through the Toolshed Plugin under the Expert
tier, ensure that the Home Counselor tool is licensed through Toolshed before
continuing.
2. Once the tool is
activated through Toolshed’s settings, the tool will automatically run and
requires no configuration at this time.
Instructions for Use
1. The Home
Counselor Tool automatically fills in the Home Counseling Provider list based
off of the Primary Borrower’s Present Address.
2. If the list does
not automatically fill immediately after filling in the address, it will be
populated a short period afterwards as users work in the loan.
3. The settings are
currently preconfigured for the standard provider types, within 500 miles. This
matches with Encompass’s default search criteria, and at the time of this
writing is not configurable within the plugin.
4. This tool
leverages the same HUD-provided APIs that both the CFPB and Encompass use, so
the data returned will be the same and up to date.
Where/What/How does this plugin query agencies?
This plugin queries the following services:
FHW - Fair Housing Pre-Purchase Education Workshops
FBC - Financial Management/Budget Counseling
FBW - Financial, Budgeting, and Credit Repair Workshops
HIC - Home Improvement and Rehabilitation Counseling
DFC - Mortgage Delinquency and Default Resolution Counseling
NDW - Non-Delinquency Post Purchase Workshops
PPC - Pre-purchase Counseling
PPW - Pre-purchase Homebuyer Education Workshops
DFW - Resolving/Preventing Mortgage Delinquency Workshops
This language queries the following languages:
English and Spanish.
The plugin is receiving data from the same source as Encompass and consumerfinance.gov, which is directly from the HUD API located at:
This plugin uses the "Search by Location" HUD API, using the geocoordinates of the borrower's present address in Encompass (fields FR0104, FR0106, FR0107, FR0108).
This plugin pulls data dynamically by distance. It starts at a distance of 50 miles from the borrower's present address and pulls all agencies in that area. If there are less than 10 agencies found, it will increase the distance to 100 and try again. It will keep repeating this in increments of 50 miles up to 2000 miles until the API returns at least 10 agencies. At that point, it will stop and process that as the agency list.
At the time of this writing, the services and languages are hard coded into the plugin. We are not able to edit this list from lender to lender. We are planning a future update where we will allow the lender to edit these options in the PowerTools settings.
Encompass Dependencies:
This product installs the following to encompass:
Plugins
LTK-HousingCounselorPlugin.dll
Custom Fields
CX.HC.IMPORT.STATUS Housing Counselor Import Status
CX.HC.IMPORT.DATE Housing Counselor Import Date