Getting a mortgage approved used to take weeks. Better.com says it can now make the approval in seconds.
On Thursday, the mortgage company announced a partnership with OpenAI that will place its AI mortgage engine directly inside ChatGPT, making it the first conversational credit decision tool for mortgages and home equity loans available to the broader financial industry.
For now, the tool, known as the Tinman AI Platform, is available to loan officers and financial institutions — not consumers directly — though that may change down the line.
Using Better’s AI tool allows a loan officer to underwrite a mortgage and generate a qualification letter in (on average) around 2 minutes and 20 seconds — a process that has historically taken 21 days.
It’s the latest example of AI taking aim at the affordability crisis from the inside — not by changing interest rates, but by stripping the waste out of the system entirely.
“The mortgage industry is riddled with inefficiencies that hurt consumers and the loan officers who serve them,” said Leah Price, General Manager of Tinman AI Platform. “Big mortgage aggregators charge what is essentially a 1% to 2% tax on each loan just to underwrite a mortgage. That ends now.”
Better CEO Vishal Garg has spent years making that case with numbers. The company says it has already cut the cost to originate a loan from the industry standard of $9,200 to roughly $3,000 — and passed on the savings to consumers. With the OpenAI partnership, Garg expects savings to further accelerate.
The Tinman engine is trained on more than a decade of mortgage data — $110 billion in funded loans, 12 million recorded customer calls, and billions of pages of documentation.
By embedding Tinman inside ChatGPT — a platform 100 million Americans already use — Better is, for the first time, making its technology available to the entire mortgage industry. Tony Song, a Better loan officer, said the platform will allow him to “serve 10x more customers daily compared to what was possible with the traditional mortgage underwriting process.”
Garg is confident this is just the first step. He told me, “We’re just getting started.”
