MORTGAGE INFORMATION SERVICES

Our Mortgage Information Services group provides mortgage lenders nationwide with a complete menu of loan-origination and administration products — services that help to complete real estate transactions and support ongoing mortgage-servicing requirements. During the year 2000, the group packaged many of its industry-leading services in new combinations to meet the needs of this ever-changing market and its evolving customer base. A parallel effort was made to increase relationships with the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, a group with distinct and individual needs that First American’s technology and products are well positioned to meet.

Product Innovations

A key product line developed within Mortgage Information Services is its default-management group, built through consolidation and technology improvements. The loss-mitigation services offered by this group provide lenders and borrowers with alternatives to foreclosure, primarily by helping them to modify delinquent loans. Within this rapidly consolidating industry, First American Default Management Solutions already stands as the country’s leading operation of its kind. With its 1999 acquisition of the nation’s largest default-processing operation, this group began to offer the industry’s first complete menu of mortgage default-related services. It also acts as the largest outsource company serving Freddie Mac’s Helping Hand Program. Because its revenues are derived primarily during times of real estate market slowdowns, default operations are counter cyclical to the activity that the remainder of the Mortgage Information Services companies depend upon.

Technology Advances

The Corporation’s technology innovations helped to raise productivity within this group during 2000, through systems designed to efficiently deliver its products and, in turn, attract clients that will increase its market share. Wide use of First American’s progressive, scalable and proprietary FAST technology is helping the group reach the goal of becoming the first in its industry to create a completely integrated system that allows products and services to be electronically ordered, routed, processed and delivered to any customer, anywhere, using any data platform. The system allows both First American and its customers to realize operating efficiencies and profitability by reducing per-order costs.

The Corporation’s primary e-commerce vehicles are FAST Web, for Internet access; FAST Win, for desktop applications; and FAST Direct, a direct connection to customers’ present systems. These systems now offer secure, electronic ordering of multiple products and around-the-clock order entry, routing, status tracking and delivery. FAST Web alone serves nearly 65,000 registered users, with approximately 1,000 additional subscribers joining the system each month.