Stay flexible, advises top program administrator

“I think the role that we play, and kind of our niche part of the industry, is providing an alternative or a solution for our agent partners that they can’t find elsewhere,” Woedl said. “It’s the way we’ve structured our programs that makes us so different and so unique. With the flexibility that we allow for our investors and our retail agents to operate on … being able to branch out not into the traditional real estate investment type of properties, but into small multi-family, into vacation rentals, into lender-placed alternative options, into non-performing notes.”

Woedl said that flexibility means being able to look ahead and adapt to an ever-evolving market.

“We’re really trying to continually pivot and be ahead of the market trends and changes that we see – not only from a carrier perspective, but also from how our investors are engaging with us,” he said. “You rewind three or four years, if an investor was doing buy-and-holds on single-family, that was really where they stayed – they stayed in that lane.

“Now we’re seeing them pivot and do all kinds of different things, engaging in different areas of the market because they’re able to pick something up for a good price. So it’s just being out in front of it and offering a competitive solution, something that’s favorable to both our agents and our investor clients.”

Woedl also said that investment in cutting-edge technology was vital to stay ahead in the program administration space.

“Technology is vital to the way that we do things, and it allows us to respond very quickly and be able to fully underwrite a location in seconds,” he said. “…We pull nearly a thousand data points from a location before we even agree to insure it – and we can do that in under a minute.

“In addition to that, our technology platform that our agents engage with us in is so smooth, so easy to use. … They can go A to Z, provided that risk is within our underwriting box, in less than five minutes. So they can quote, bind and issue a policy to their investor clients in less than five minutes.”

Discover more of Shawn Woedl’s insights into how to make a program stand out from the pack here