AI Can Create FEMA Flood Certs for Mortgage Files

Lenders pay third party providers, such as CoreLogic, to lookup and create official Flood Certification Forms that are required in loan files. Flood plain information is public, so I did some investigation to see if I could use AI to pull this information.

I signed up for ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) and experimented with their 3rd party plugins, which had been newly released functionality at the time. I used a PDF plugin which allowed me to update forms. After a bit of prompt tweaking, ChatGPT was able to lookup an address in the FEMA Flood Plain database and then create a Flood Cert showing the correct flood zone.

I purposely picked a property that was in a flood zone and the AI created Flood Certificate came back correctly.

This leads me to ask why lenders are paying big bucks to third parties to create these. However, there is some possible ongoing flood information servicing that CoreLogic does for these loans once they have closed and moved to servicing. I am not familiar with this but if you order a flood certificate and mark it ‘Life of Loan’, it is a different level of future servicing from CoreLogic than NOT marking in ‘Life of Loan’ when you order. But if anyone can have AI pull a flood certification at any time for basically free, I’m not sure what the value of ‘life of loan’ options are.  More investigation is needed here.