Black Knight Financial Services Launches Mortgage and Housing Market Index Suite to Aid Economic Forecasting, Decision-Making, Research and Modeling

• Black Knight Index Suite expands upon the company’s Home Price Index with a series of indices designed to provide insights into the housing and mortgage markets with unmatched depth, coverage and currency
  
• Consolidates Black Knight’s comprehensive proprietary data and cutting-edge analytics
• Designed to provide objective and robust benchmarks for measuring housing and mortgage market performance
• Comprised of two sub-series: a Mortgage Market Index Series and a Housing Market Index Series

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Aug. 08, 2017 -- The Data & Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services (NYSE:BKFS) today introduced the Black Knight Index Suite, a series of indices designed to provide insights into the housing and mortgage markets with comprehensive depth, coverage and currency. Based upon Black Knight’s vast property and mortgage datasets, and using modeling and analytics techniques refined over 20 years, the Black Knight Index Suite expands upon the company’s existing Home Price Index (HPI) by adding three new indices: the Mortgage Market Index, Housing Market Index and a Home Listing Index. As explained by Julian Grey, Mortgage Market Leader for Black Knight’s Data & Analytics division, the Index Suite has been designed to provide objective and robust benchmarks for measuring housing and mortgage market performance. The suite’s rich collection of indices can provide useful tools for economic forecasting, decision-making, risk management, research and modeling, as well as a wide range of other applications.

“Developing the Index Suite was a natural, logical progression for Black Knight,” said Grey. “HPIs have long served as valid analytic proxies for gauging the value of real property in a given geography, and today, they’re widely used as an acceptable alternative to AVMs for marking portfolios to market. The beauty of an HPI is that it takes vast amounts of data and presents it in a very simple, easy-to-digest-and-process form. We sought to take a page from that proven HPI model and put it to work in other data-heavy aspects of the industry.”

The Black Knight Index Suite is comprised of two sub-series: a Mortgage Market Index Series and a Housing Market Index Series. The Mortgage Market Index Series tracks changes in portfolio risk profiles via Mortgage Origination and Mortgage Performance Indices, each consisting of monthly time series measuring market and mortgage performance over the life cycle of a group of loans. The Mortgage Market Index Series is believed to be the first of its kind available on the market to provide thorough mortgage performance analysis based on geographical, cohort-level risks.

The Housing Market Indices include both an enhanced version of the Black Knight HPI and a forthcoming Home Listing Index (HLI). The enhanced HPI now includes support for 3-digit ZIP codes – the first three digits of a standard 5-digit ZIP code -- for easier matching with Credit Risk Transfer data and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae single-family mortgage performance data. It also includes views of historical monthly home price movements, HPI forecast scenarios and time coverage extending back to 1975. The forthcoming HLI will provide previously unavailable insights into the supply side of the housing market.

“Countless decisions are based upon assumptions around home prices, market ‘heat,’ origination volumes and prepayment and default activity,” Grey added. “Vast personnel, time and capital resources have been expended answering some very core questions related to these assumptions. The Black Knight Index Suite eliminates a lot of that work, making analysts far more efficient and helping decision-makers across the enterprise base conclusions upon the collective intelligence of many terabytes of raw data – with trusted analytics making sense of it all. With the Index Suite, users can avoid the much larger cost and commitment of taking on analysis of the datasets themselves.”

The Black Knight Index Suite can be used in numerous situations, including:

• Helping senior management in the mortgage and housing market with making more informed decisions, planning future investments, hedging and market repositioning
• Supporting mortgage risk management, including risk-based pricing and collection strategies
• Constructing/validating mortgage performance models
• Analyzing housing market risk for investment, trading and portfolio rebalancing
• Conducting research based on clean, information-rich data covering mortgage and real estate market performance
• Helping with financial planning and reporting

About Black Knight Financial Services, Inc. 
Black Knight Financial Services, Inc. (NYSE:BKFS) is a leading provider of integrated technology, data and analytics solutions that facilitate and automate many of the business processes across the mortgage lifecycle.

Black Knight Financial Services is committed to being a premier business partner that lenders and servicers rely on to achieve their strategic goals, realize greater success and better serve their customers by delivering best-in-class technology, services and insight with a relentless commitment to excellence, innovation, integrity and leadership. For more information on Black Knight Financial Services, please visit www.BKFS.com.

SOURCE: BLACK KNIGHT FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC. 

For more information:

Michelle Kersch
904.854.5043
[email protected] 

Mitch Cohen	
646.926.7741
[email protected]