The 2010 RESPA Final Rule was designed to simplify HUD form processing as well as to ensure timely disclosure of full settlement costs. Simple is a relative term and real estate professionals should not be trying to complete the “simpler” HUD 1 settlement sheet by hand. Today’s real estate regulations are too strict to trust to fallible humans.
Inexpensive RESPA software protects real estate professionals and their clients by facilitating RESPA compliance. Agents can use the GFE-HUD comparison sheet to ensure the figures on each form make sense. Figures from the GFE and HUD are automatically copied over onto the comparison sheet so agents know the numbers in the summary are the same as the numbers on the actual forms.
There was mixed reaction to the 2010 RESPA Final Rule’s provisions on fee itemization. Although the rule was designed to prevent consumers from being buried under a laundry list of petty fees by presenting them with a lump sum total, many organizations–including the federal government that made the new rule!–want the fees broken out. Agents using real estate title software can present the lump sums to their clients while still retaining the itemized lists of charges to show to other interested parties.
Finally, monitoring all the setoff charges on a HUD-1 settlement statement can be a nightmare. Our software includes a setoff tracker that makes it easy to list each charge, attribute it to the buyer or seller as appropriate, and credit or debit the correct total on the first page of the statement.
HUD documents are too complicated to do by hand. Software helps you stay in compliance with RESPA laws, ensures your calculations are correct, minimizes the chance of data entry error by not forcing you to enter the same information multiple times, and greatly accelerates the time it takes to process a closing.
