MISMO update May 2016

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on C-MISMO, but finally there is some real progress to report. We are releasing an updated rent roll standard for a 60-day public comment period, and Fannie Mae is going to announce its support for the standard this week in Dallas at the MBA Commercial Servicing and Technology Conference.

A little over a year ago, I gave up my leadership post on the C-MISMO Board and instead became the leader of the rent roll and operating statement work group. Brian Hunt from Fannie Mae took over from me as chairperson, and Tom Sitzler from a consulting company was put in as vice chair. Fannie Mae had worked with Tom’s group on implementing MISMO XML standards in the residential mortgage space, and they agreed to work together and try to provide support and help promote reporting standardization in the commercial space.

Basically, my role as leader of the rent roll work group was a repeat of the exercise we did back in 2010 where we mapped out the data structure and fields of both rent rolls and operation statements. The difference this time was Fannie Mae was at the meetings and they brought both the business and technical resources needed to really add value. The data structure and elements were compared to their models, and their data experts managed the data mapping spreadsheet and signed off on the schema. In fact, the XSD that will be released as part of the standard was built by the Fannie Mae data team.

We were hoping to have the file out before the conference, but we are still writing the sample XML to go along with the XSD and cleaning up the final Excel data map. Looking like early June when we will release the documents for a 60-day public comment period. Regardless, from what I understand, the Fannie Mae DUS servicers are going to be told this week to get ready to report in C-MISMO XML format. I hope this is the spark that helps adoption. We have a booth at the conference, so I will report back on how it goes.

— — —

Jim Flaherty is CEO of CMBS.com and the creator of the Backshop loan origination system. He is a trained credit professional with experience installing enterprise underwriting systems for commercial real estate lenders, rating agencies and investors.