Two originators can send us economically identical collateral and end up with very different outcomes: one gets a firm bid in 24 hours, the other spends three weeks in back-and-forth before pricing is even indicative. The loans were the same. The tape was not.
A loan tape is the first impression a buyer has of your operation, and often the only one. Below are the six fields our trading desk reads before anything else, why each one moves pricing, and what a clean version looks like.
1. Current unpaid principal balance, as of a stated date
A UPB column with no "as of" date is the single most common reason a tape gets sent back. Balances drift with every payment cycle, and a buyer pricing off a stale figure has to either haircut the bid or re-cut the file later. Stamp the tape with an effective date and keep every row on that same date.
What good looks like
- One
UPBcolumn, oneUPB_As_Of_Datecolumn, same date on every row. - Original balance carried separately. Do not overwrite it.
2. Note rate, and whether it is fixed or adjustable
Rate drives yield, and yield drives the bid. But the rate alone is not enough on adjustable paper: without index, margin, caps, and next reset date, an ARM has to be priced conservatively because the buyer is guessing at the forward coupon. Sellers who supply full ARM detail routinely see tighter pricing on the same loans, simply because the buyer no longer has to charge for uncertainty.
3. Payment history, the real one
"Performing" is a conclusion, not a data field. What a buyer needs is the underlying record: months of seasoning, a delinquency string, and any modification, forbearance, or deferral in the loan's history. Disclosing a past 30-day late is almost never a pricing problem. Discovering one during diligence, after a bid has been issued, is a problem, because it calls the rest of the tape into question.
This is the field where we see the most self-inflicted damage. Sellers scrub the history to make a pool look cleaner, and the re-cut after diligence costs them more than the blemish ever would have.
4. Property type and occupancy, stated plainly
A 1-4 family owner-occupied first mortgage, a DSCR-underwritten investment property, and a short-term rental are three different assets with three different buyer pools, even at the same LTV and FICO. Tapes that collapse these into a generic "residential" bucket force the buyer to price to the worst case in the bucket.
The same applies on the commercial side: multifamily and mixed-use go to different desks. Label them.
5. Lien position and current LTV or ARV basis
First or second lien, and the valuation the ratio is built on. For performing residential, that means the appraised value and its date. For fix & flip and transitional paper, it means after-repair value, the current draw position, and how much holdback remains unfunded. A transitional loan tape without the draw schedule is not really a tape; it is a starting point for a conversation.
6. Servicing status and transfer readiness
Servicing-released or servicing-retained changes both the price and the timeline. So does the practical question underneath it: who holds the collateral file, how fast can it move, and is there a subservicer whose consent is required. Deals rarely die on economics. They die on a custodian who takes six weeks to release files.
The format matters less than you think
We are asked constantly which template to use. The honest answer is that it matters far less than completeness. We accept Excel, Fannie 3.2, or your own custom layout. If the six fields above are present, populated, and internally consistent, our desk can work with almost any structure.
What we cannot work with is a tape where the same loan appears twice under different IDs, where UPB and original balance are silently swapped in some rows, or where blank cells could mean either zero or unknown. Use an explicit null convention and say what it is.
A practical pre-submission check
- Does every row have a loan ID that is unique across the file?
- Is there one effective date, stated on the tape itself?
- Do the rate, term, and balance fields produce a payment that matches the payment column?
- Are blanks intentional, and is their meaning documented?
- Would someone outside your shop be able to tell what each asset is without calling you?
Five of those five is a tape that gets a real number back quickly. Three of five is a tape that gets an indication with conditions attached.
Why we are direct about this
Time kills deals. Every round trip on data quality is a week your capital stays tied up and a week the market can move against the trade. We would rather tell you exactly what we read first than have you guess. And a seller who submits a clean tape once tends to submit clean tapes forever, which is precisely the programmatic relationship we are looking for.
If you want a second set of eyes before you send anything formally, our desk will review a sample layout and tell you what is missing. There is no minimum, and there is no obligation.
