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Your goal: surface property risk into your underwriting decision, confirm hazard and flood binders meet escrow/investor requirements, and watch collateral insurability across your pipeline.
CoverGuard's mortgage workspace serves everyone in the loan chain — mortgage brokers, loan officers, and correspondent/retail lenders and servicers. (The account role is labelled Mortgage at signup.)
New to CoverGuard? Do Getting started first. This guide is your first-week playbook in mortgage.
What your workspace looks like
The mortgage workspace is intelligence- and finance-heavy:
- Search / Shop by budget — property lookup and budget-first discovery.
- Property — saved properties and Records.
- Dashboard — your book at a glance (active clients, open pipeline, renewals due), client activity since your last visit, a slim "do next" strip, and a borrower list ordered by what needs you. The Loan Portfolio card opens the properties behind your loans — flood hazard exposure, property risk, and which loans have unverified or expiring insurance. If your plan doesn't include it, the card says which plan does instead of disappearing. Rate locks about to run out lead that strip, naming the borrower and the date, so you find out there rather than by opening the tracker — see Alerts.
- Toolkit — the loan stack: DTI/LTV calculator, mortgage & affordability calculators, closing-cost and property-tax estimators, plus lender tools (loan pipeline, insurance-binder verification, loan-level risk underwriting, conditions tracker, force-placed insurance alerts, escrow compliance, an escrow reserve calculator, HMDA reporting, NMLS lookup, LOS integration). The Rate Lock Tracker card carries a count when locks need you — the same ones the dashboard is showing.
- Sys Admin — LOS/CRM integrations, developer/API.
"Do next" adapts to where you are. While you're still getting set up it leads with the one setup step that unlocks the most — running your first property check, then the others in order. Once you're up and running it switches to live alerts on its own. You never have to configure it, and it never leaves you with nothing: when genuinely nothing needs you, it says so and offers a property to check.
Plus the CoverGuard Advisor everywhere. (CoverGuard Agents are off by default for lenders — if you want them, ask your company admin to turn them on for you from Account → Settings → Team.)
Your first week
1. Check collateral insurability on a loan
Search the subject property. The answer-first Record tells you immediately whether the property is insurable and which carriers are binding — the fastest read on whether a hazard/flood binder will be obtainable. Pay attention to the Bind-Path signal and insurability band. See The CoverGuard Record.
Your Record is set up for a loan file: under the score you'll see the coverage gate and how confident it is, the cover that's required (flood is named, with the rule behind it, when it's required), and insurance escrow a month — the required cover's monthly cost, insurance only, before property taxes. The gate and required cover start open, and the evidence leads with the property details. When nothing needs fixing, your next step is Attach this Record to the loan file, which takes you to the Record PDF download.
In the lender pilot? If CoverGuard has added you to the lender pilot, an Insurance condition for the loan file card sits under the score. It holds facts only, with no score, and is written to be pasted into a credit memo:
- The coverage gate as a condition to close. For example: "do not clear to close on the score alone" while carrier requirements are open, or that forced placement isn't available when every carrier declined.
- Insurance escrow a month.
- Premium-to-value against the market norm.
- Deductible exposure in dollars, to check against the borrower's reserves.
- For a property only the last-resort market will take, a policy admissibility flag.
If carrier confidence is moderate or low, the card says so first and recommends a re-pull. Its last line records how many carriers were checked, the date, the model version and that the condition wording is a draft pending legal review.
2. Check the property and the market behind the binder
Use Insurance Binder Verification (Toolkit / lender tools) before you clear-to-close.
Pick the subject property, enter the loan amount, and check the appraised value — it fills itself in from the property's own valuation, so you usually only confirm it. You don't tell CoverGuard whether the property is in a flood zone or how exposed it is to wind, hail or earthquake: the check reads that from the property's own risk profile and the carriers currently writing there, and tells you what a hand-entered figure never could — for example, that flood insurance is required here and that no carrier in this market is writing it.
Know what it does and doesn't inspect. It answers two questions: does the property's value support the coverage this loan requires, and what will the market write here. It does not read the binder document itself — so take the "coverage the loan requires" figure it gives you and compare it against the binder's own dwelling coverage yourself. The verdict reads No blockers or Conditions remain, which is a statement about the property and the market, not a sign-off on the binder.
An incomplete check never passes. If CoverGuard couldn't read the property's risk profile or the carriers writing there, or the flood zone hasn't been measured yet, the verdict reads Incomplete — cannot pass and the affected rows say Not confirmed rather than guessing. Run it again later, or confirm the flood zone and market yourself before you clear-to-close.
Each condition is spelled out in plain language, and every check is saved under Previous checks, so you can close the toolkit, come back, and still have the record — add the binding carrier and policy number and it becomes a dated note you can point to at closing. Re-run it rather than relying on an older row; it is a snapshot of the risk and carrier picture at the moment you ran it. If a check couldn't be saved, the card says so rather than listing it as a record.
Lender accounts on a Pro plan. On a lower tier the card shows an upgrade prompt; on a non-lender account type it says so plainly, since upgrading wouldn't change it.
3. Read the insurance market behind a loan
Use Loan-Level Risk Underwriting (Toolkit / lender tools) when you want to know how hard a property will be to insure before it reaches underwriting.
Pick the property and choose Run underwriting assessment. You get two answers:
- Placability — which part of the market the property is likely to be placed in, from Preferred and Standard through Non-standard to Surplus lines only and Residual market only (for example a state FAIR Plan), with the markets to look in.
- Carriers by peril — for fire, wind & hail, flood and earthquake, the property's own risk level and how many carriers are actively writing that coverage here. A peril with no carrier actively writing it is flagged, because that is the coverage most likely to hold up a clear-to-close.
What it means. This is a read of the market, not a promise from any carrier. A carrier "actively writing" is open to new business in the area — it has not agreed to insure this property, and price and coverage are set only when a carrier confirms. Where CoverGuard has no live carrier feed for a property, the card says the carrier availability is modeled.
Each run is saved, and the property's earlier assessments are listed under the result with their date and placability (the per-peril detail is shown on the run itself, so re-run to see it again). If a run couldn't be saved, the card says so.
Lender accounts on a Pro plan. On a lower tier the card shows an upgrade prompt; on an account type it isn't built for, it says so plainly.
4. Run the loan math
Use the DTI / LTV Calculator (Conventional/FHA/VA/USDA presets) and the Mortgage calculator — the latter models the insurance line per peril, so the PITI you show a borrower reflects real hazard exposure, not a flat estimate. See Mortgage calculator.
5. Build your loan pipeline
Open Loan Pipeline in your Toolkit and choose Add loan — borrower, loan amount, stage and, if you like, the property address and a target close date. Pick the borrower from your clients to link the loan to their record, or just type a name. Each stage tile (Origination, Processing, Underwriting, Clear to close, Funded) shows how many loans sit there and their dollar volume; move a loan along by changing its stage on the list. Everything is saved as you go, so the pipeline is exactly as you left it when you come back.
Then open Conditions Tracker, pick a loan, and add each condition as Prior to docs or Prior to funding. Tick one off when it clears — the card counts how many are cleared for that loan, and the ticks stay put after a reload. Conditions belong to a pipeline loan, so add the loan first; removing a loan from the pipeline removes its conditions too.
Both are lists you keep yourself — nothing is pulled from your loan origination system. Manage the borrower relationships behind them in Clients. See Clients & deals.
6. Let carrier-exit alerts watch your book
On a Pro plan, carrier-exit alerts run automatically — save the collateral properties and you're warned on your Dashboard when a carrier stops writing on a market where you have exposure, a leading indicator of a force-placement or escrow problem. There's no toggle to flip. See Alerts.
7. Scan for force-placement risk before it triggers
Use Force-Placed Insurance Alerts (Toolkit / lender tools) to scan your portfolio for loans where a borrower's own hazard policy has lapsed or is about to, coverage has fallen below the property's value, or a carrier has exited that market — the three signals that most often lead to an expensive, lender-initiated force-placed policy. It's built entirely from your own saved client insurance records plus CoverGuard's carrier-exit tracking, so there's nothing to connect — acknowledge an alert once you've reviewed it and know your servicing team is on it.
8. Connect your loan system
If your bank runs nCino, connect it in Sys Admin → Integration Hub: your loans arrive with their collateral address, each property gets an insurability check, and the findings can go back onto the Collateral record. See Connect nCino.
If you originate in Encompass, connect it the same way and your loan officers can order a CoverGuard check from inside a loan — the findings come back on the order, with the report attached. See Connect Encompass. Encompass is switched on per account; until it is, picking it sends your IT team a setup request instead.
LendingPad and Blend don't have a one-click connection yet. Pick one in the same wizard and CoverGuard emails your IT team what's needed to finish the setup, or use the Auto-Mapping tool for a system with a published API. See Integrations.
If your plan includes the Integration Hub, "Do next" will suggest this while you're still getting set up, and stops suggesting it once a system is connected (or once you've started saving properties, if your team doesn't use one).
Compliance & reporting
Lenders get the compliance-heavy surface: User Audit Log, State Regulation Library, E&O tracking, Data Retention, plus Book-of-Business and Loss Runs reporting. Find these under Toolkit / the relevant nav surfaces.
Tips
- The Record's valuation section applies an uncapped liquidity discount when a property is effectively unplaceable — a useful collateral-risk flag.
- Ask the CoverGuard Advisor to summarize a property's insurability in lender terms, or to compare binder options.
- Refresh a whole client's collateral at once. In the Toolkit's Collateral Risk Summaries, choose the client and press Generate for all of this client's properties. Every property you've saved for that client gets a fresh summary in one go (up to 25 per run, most recently saved first), and the loan amount and appraised value you already entered for each are kept. If one property can't be generated, the rest still are, and the card names the one that didn't so you can retry it on its own. The one-property Generate still works as before. Refreshing keeps your review: regenerating a summary — one property or a whole client — updates the risk, carrier, premium and value figures, and keeps your compliance notes, your flood-insurance-verified mark, the client it's filed under, and any compliance status you set yourself — except when a refresh finds the property Unacceptable (it can't be insured, or no carrier is writing it), which always shows. If CoverGuard can't read your existing figures or summary, it doesn't refresh it at all (the card says so) rather than risk clearing what you entered. A property whose flood zone hasn't been measured shows Not measured — verify the flood zone instead of a flood answer.
Troubleshooting quick hits
- "Analytics / alerts / Records are locked." — These are paid-tier features. See Billing & plans.
- "LOS sync isn't working." — See Integrations & API.
- "No carriers on a rural/coastal property." — May be a genuinely hard market; read the insurability note and check Bind-Path. See Search & Records.
Do this next
Run a subject property through Search and read its Bind-Path and insurability band — that's your fastest signal that a hazard/flood binder will be obtainable at close.