The process for originating multifamily loans was long overdue for an overhaul. Loans for multifamily properties, such as an apartment building, involve hundreds of documents that require input from numerous parties in government and banking.

LendingStandard CEO Andrew Kallenbach envisioned a more efficient, automated, and standardized path out of the documentation mire.

Twenty years ago, Kallenbach experienced similar obstacles when he was hired by a firm that conducted underwriting and property inspection for commercial insurance companies. That industry’s process was bogged down by byzantine Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

“The process was incredibly manual,” Kallenbach said. “It was easy to make mistakes.”

Loan documents were laborious to create, update without error and coordinate among all parties.

Kallenbach, then 17 years old, wrote software to automate and streamline the document process. Subsequently, Kallenbach developed FormZapper, a startup predecessor to LendingStandard, that tackled similar documentation issues with multi-family loans in commercial real estate.

Kallenbach’s innovative software attracted the interest of an attorney at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who worked within the problem-laden process.

“With multifamily loans, the documents often don’t match. Lenders didn’t follow checklists,” Kallenbach said.

Before he could fully address the problem, Kallenbach needed to understand multifamily loans, so he worked for a St. Louis firm.

“I had to learn the industry and whole process to help automate it,” Kallenbach said.

LendingStandard, a software-as-a-service platform, is a standardized, automated and seamless process that “uses best practices” for multifamily property loans.

“HUD and Fannie Mae use boilerplate documents. When rules change for those documents, it affects all loans in process that have to get updated in Excel and Word documents,” Kallenbach said. “It’s hard to do manually with many loans in progress. It gets expensive. It’s also difficult to keep all parties on the same page when loans update.”

LendingStandard’s platform saves time, minimizes mistakes, reduces bottlenecks, tracks compliance and facilitates the flow of communication.

Berkadia, a leading multifamily lending company, signed as a client in early 2017.

“It was a huge deal for us. It gives us credibility and proved our value proposition,” Kallenbach said. “We’ve built a lot of things for them to prove our platform. We specialized in niche multifamily loans, and we’re good at it.”

Looking ahead, Kallenbach said, “We want a robust list of really good lenders seriously interested in better financing. We’ll also further automate our system and add services and products.”