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Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler sat down with Jeff Bell, president of both UpWell Mortgage and software company Uplist, to talk about how he thinks about technology, and the good news that the industry is turning a corner after two rough years. Bell was in tech in the late 1990s, then got into the mortgage business in 2022, doing everything from production to owning a mortgage company.
This interview has been edited for length and clarify.
Sarah Wheeler: How does being an originator inform how you think about technology?
Jeff Bell: Everything I think about is around efficiencies and accuracy. Part of why I started Uplist was listing flyers. You create a listing flyer — you have no idea what you’re going to put on there. You’re just guessing on, like, a 20% down or a 10% down, or an FHA, or whatever. You’re guessing on a credit score, you’re guessing on down payment, you’re guessing on everything. After you create it, you send it out to the agent and they put it in their listing on Friday. The bond market moves 50 basis points on Monday, and now everything’s out of date. Now you’re redoing it again.
I thought there should be a way to automate it. So we built a flyer with a QR code on it that points to a library search where the customer can put in whatever they want and the way it’s designed is specific to that listing. In two minutes, I can generate a flyer that has the landing page and everything on it, and I never have to update it again. And when the market changes, I can just call — now I have a reason to call the real estate agent. Instead of getting on a computer to change all this stuff and send it back out to them, now I can just shoot the URL off to the agent.
Another great example is that if a buyer is going to a mortgage calculator site looking for how much the tax and insurance will be, those estimates are insane. None of them are accurate. With our flyer, the LO has already put this in on the back end, they’ve already looked up county records for the taxes or got them from the agent. We’ve run this against national sites like Redfin and Zillow and the payments are coming out way better because Uplist is more accurate, even if the rate is the same.
SW: What differentiates your technology?
JB: It’s accurate and it’s easy. I want to push a button and have everything done for me — and see my results without having to go to the county website, or go hop on Zillow and check this, or go check closing costs, or go to the title and escrow company to find out what the fees are for something. Nor do I want to spend the time to build presentations, to write the email. I literally want to push a button. So when we create our stuff, it’s essentially — push a button, or push a couple buttons, and your job is done.
Our Recapture product monitors loans, does a deep analysis and then sends a presentation to the customer about options to save them money. Doing that manually would be a 30- to 45-minute process for any LO — I wanted to automate that process. The first thing Recapture does after seeing an opportunity is do a county records check to make sure that people still own the property. Because a lot of times you get into a loan review and you get all excited about it, and you find out they don’t even own the property anymore after you did all this work.
SW: How are you guys leveraging AI? Is your Recapture product built on AI?
JB: None of this is AI. There’s some AI stuff that we’re working on right now that I can’t talk about, but for Recapture, this is all logic based.
A lot of the industry doesn’t realize how many refinance opportunities are actually in their database. Right now, the opportunity is not so obvious, like it would be in a refi boom. So we identify things that people might not have otherwise been aware of. Like two months ago when the rates dropped for just a brief period of time, we had a lot of people who got refinances really fast, because they were able to hop in and just say ‘here’s one, here’s one, here’s one.’
And if we see a Fed rate cut next week, or anything happens with economic data that causes rates to come down, they’re already set up to where all they have to do is open up, push a button and sort by rate and say, I’m going to go find more deals today.
SW: What keeps you up at night?
JB: How fast we can build stuff and how we prioritize ideas. For instance, we get a lot of great feedback from Uplist users like, hey, it would be really cool if the system did this or it did that. We get a lot of those. And so trying to come up with a priority list that makes sure that you’re making your product as good as it can be, but also thinking about what items are going to satisfy the user base the most — what’s the highest need?
Also, we are having a lot of conversations at Uplist right now with potential integration partners. But I don’t think those areas really keep me up worried as much as they just keep me up thinking. I’m up with ideas and strategy.
SW: What are you looking forward to in 2025?
JB: I think our industry is turning a corner. It’s been two and a half really rough years. January 1st, New Year’s, can mark a milestone that it will be better this year, even though it might have started getting better a couple months ago. I’m looking forward to a more positive environment for the industry.
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