Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday, Oct. 26, for the local office of Bee Window App. Curtis Wood, CEO and co-founder of Bee Window App, is pictured in the center with the scissors, surrounded by Bee Window App employees and investors and chamber representatives. To Wood’s right are Mike and Lisa Elliott and to his left are Lynae and Alpheus Eherenman. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union.

By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — Through new technology, Bee Mortgage App is working to make homeownership more affordable and accessible for everyone.

Thursday afternoon, Oct. 26, they celebrated their new local office opening with a Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting ceremony at 207 S. Buffalo St., Warsaw.

Curtis Wood, co-founder and CEO of Bee Mortgage App, explained, “We are a mortgage broker, but we are building a mortgage app that is like Uber or Venmo for the mortgage industry.”

He said it’s super-easy to use and it uses Blockchain, Smart Contracts, OCR and some AI applications to read data so a person can get a mortgage easily on their phone.

“Instead of having to talk to a bank or lender, you get a mortgage on your time and not the bank’s time,” he said. “A lot of people think Rocket Mortgage when they hear that it’s an app. Rocket Mortgage is a slick ad campaign — as soon as they get your name and phone number, they call you, they send you through the same old process that everybody hates.”

Wood said what Bee Mortgage App is doing is “using new technology to automate the loan origination process to make homeownership more affordable and accessible for everyone.”

The app is in the process of being built now, he said, so it’s about 60% finished and not live yet. Wood said they will release it in about six months.

“But in preparation of that, and advance of that, we’re opening our first office here. We’ve got our mortgage broker license in Indiana, and we’re basically just setting up the infrastructure to release the app so that when the app is live in the app store, we’re fully licensed, have an office and ready to go,” he said.

Alpheus Eherenman, a company investor, said the idea behind the app is “you can be walking through a house, decide that you want to get a loan to buy the house, get on your phone, complete the application on the app and get a mortgage. In just a relatively short time period.”

Wood said some applicants, with verified income and assets, can be preapproved within 8-1/2 minutes.

“Most mortgage lenders use outdated technology that was built in the ’90s. We use Blockchains, Smart Contracts, AI to read documents instead of humans, so we’ve automated a lot of the steps that loan officers and processors are doing. Not only that, we made it mobile. You’ll interface with the mobile app instead of having to deal with a loan officer or processor,” Wood said.

For the mobile generation that does everything on their phone, he said, right now there’s no real mortgage app that takes a person from start to finish on their phone to get a mortgage.

“You may start on your phone, but eventually you end up talking to a loan officer or processor, tons of emails, tons of phone calls – that’s what we’re eliminating with the app that we’re building,” Wood said. “And, again, it’s not live now. We do have a mortgage calculator that’s live in the app store now. It has over 10,000 downloads. But the mortgage app that we’re building – the fancy one, the Uber for mortgages – is going to be released probably June or July next year.”

They are a licensed mortgage broker in Indiana and Florida.

To speak to someone directly, a person can call 904-316-5566 or speak to local mortgage loan officer Lynae Eherenman at (574) 377-0150.

The Bee Mortgage App website can be found at beemortgageapp.com.