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Craig Cotton Joins Spruce as VP of Product

Craig Cotton, VP of Product, Spruce

Proptech provider Spruce [1] has announced the appointment of Craig Cotton [2] as VP of Product, a role where he will work to identify, build, and deliver even more meaningful products to serve Spruce's customers nationwide.

"Craig has a proven ability to deeply understand–and then fulfill–customer needs," said Patrick Burns [3], CEO and Co-Founder of Spruce. "This strategic, customer-centric mindset is essential as we continue to grow and expand our service offering to solve the many challenges within the real estate transaction process."

Cotton brings nearly 25 years of product experience to Spruce, including five years at Amazon Web Services [4], where he led the product team for Amazon S3, as well as strategic initiatives for the AWS IoT service team.

"Although in many ways it feels like early days of the transformation, Spruce's technology and team have the power to make meaningful change within the real estate industry," said Cotton. "Pairing this large market opportunity with my passion and experience for scaling growth-focused teams and mechanisms, I'm excited to help serve Spruce's customer-centric mission."

The hiring of Cotton is Spruce’s latest move to bolster its team, having recently added Brian Kielian [5] as the company's first Head of Customer Experience, and Blair Drake [5] as the company's first Head of Service Delivery.

Boosting its internal team comes on the heels of the launch of Spruce’s new underwriting model [6] that provides a fully underwritten title commitment in minutes. Spruce’s underwriting tool operates an automated title search and underwriting model for transactions, resulting in cost-savings and a reduction in multiple-day searches.

Spruce also recently announced an integration with FlexClose [7], a warehouse financing service from FirstFunding. FlexClose Funding is a new process that enables certainty of funds, extended funding times, and cost savings for both lenders and borrowers. Through FlexClose, Spruce can closely integrate the escrow process with the warehouse lender—allowing loan funds to move outside of the Federal Reserve—resulting in longer business hours, lower risk, and reduced cost to lenders. In turn, settlement agents close transactions faster, while borrowers can avoid delays.