One thing that can be said with certainty about reverse mortgages – otherwise known as Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs) – is that there is no shortage of different options in terms of product offerings and features.

For a senior preparing to get a reverse mortgage loan, it can be daunting and intimidating to get more information about the whole plethora of available options, and cutting through the noise to find out which kinds of options will be best for an individual borrower can be a difficult thing to do.

This is where ARLO™ – the All Reverse Loan Optimizer – comes into play. ARLO™, launched in 2017 by Orange, Calif.-based reverse mortgage lender All Reverse Mortgage, aims to simplify the process of finding the right reverse mortgage by allowing prospective applicants to preview an array of different loans with several variables, including annual rates, origination fees, and credits.

ARLO's goal is to help borrowers navigate the landscape of product offerings, mortgage insurance premiums, and principal limit factors to find the right option for them and their situation. “I believe this is a win for the consumer while also supporting the needed solvency of the reverse mortgage program,” All Reverse president Cliff Auerswald says.

With ARLO™, borrower prospects can gain real-time amortization, interest rate, and closing-cost projections, allowing them to get a sense of the actual costs associated with getting a reverse mortgage — both upfront and on an ongoing basis. ARLO™ also covers a searchable database of more than 1,600 questions and answers aimed toward helping prospective borrowers learn more about reverse mortgages and how they can expect the loans to impact their own financial situations.

One of the things that separates ARLO™ from other places where you may find reverse mortgage information is that it has a dedicated, real-time answering process for any possible reverse mortgage question submitted to it. That’s one of the things that helps to make the tool so unique: if your question revolves around a deeply specific financial scenario or the ways in which certain product features could interact with other parts of a potential applicant’s finances, ARLO™ will have it answered as quickly as possible.

And, for those questions that have already been asked, the searchable database of more than 1,600 previously answered questions may already cover topics that some potential borrowers already need information about. Hundreds of questions over nearly 20 existing topic areas are accessible to anyone using ARLO™, so there is a good likelihood that a potential issue has already been answered.

For situations and scenarios where this is not the case, however, ARLO™ is ready and able to locate the answers for any other issues that could present themselves in terms of a borrower’s reverse mortgage uncertainty. A major reason for ARLO™’s ability to answer a whole host of questions on the topic comes from the experience that guides ARLO™’s answers: the experience of All Reverse Mortgage CEO and owner Michael G. Branson and All Reverse’s team of reverse mortgage-specific experts.

Michael has over 45 years of experience in the mortgage banking industry and has spent nearly two decades focused specifically on the reverse mortgage sector. Mike has a lot of “firsts” under his belt, beginning in 1982 while employed as a Regional Vice President of Operations at General Electric Mortgage Insurance Corporation, where Mike was the youngest Regional Vice President at any Mortgage Insurance Company. That was the first time that GE brought the first AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities to market, and Mike was part of the underwriting team that took part in the endeavor. Michael was also part of the team that developed and introduced the first fixed-rate, proprietary jumbo reverse mortgage to market, which was sold to a private investor in 2007.

Michael has specialized in reverse mortgages for nearly 20 years, and his expertise in the field has been called on in interviews for several publications, including Forbes, Kiplinger Retirement Report, MarketWatch, HousingWire, Reverse Mortgage Daily, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His work with reverse mortgages has helped to solidify him as an authority on the topic, and it’s this authority that underpins the wide information database that ARLO™ stands as in the reverse mortgage business.

ARLO™ has been praised by both the reverse mortgage business itself and associated trade publications as valuing the ability to give good information to borrowers before simply selling them a product. The longest-lived, most successful reverse mortgage loans come from a borrower having access to a great deal of good information, and ARLO can be a major tool in making sure that a reverse mortgage applicant has access to all the information that they need and want before they sign on the dotted line.

Find out today how ARLO™ can help you. Whether you have a question covered by a pre-existing topic like basic eligibility up through loan maturity or if you have a unique question that’s never been asked of the tool before, ARLO™ offers real-time answers to your important questions on reverse mortgage loans.