We’re continuing our conversation about scaling your mortgage business through referrals. If you missed last week’s post covering the three keys to blowing up your real estate referrals, go back and read that gem. To recap, you want to ditch the cheesy sales pitch, be genuine with social media engagement, and leverage the co-branding abilities of your digital mortgage tools.

In this week’s article, we’re going to uncover reasons that despite your efforts, you’re still not getting a steady stream of qualified leads from your real estate partners and clients. Before we start digging in, you must adopt the right mindset. 

Remember that getting leads –from any source –requires sustained, nurturing effort. 

Just like you can’t expect a prospective borrower to convert into a client after just one conversion or after sending one email, you can’t expect referrals to pour in when you’re applying sporadic, half-assed effort. Resolve that referrals are a critical part of your lead generation and that you’ll work at it with the same drive as other lead gen avenues every day.  

Worst Mistakes When It Comes to Getting More Mortgage Referrals

Not Asking For Referrals / Lack of Promotion

Many mortgage professionals struggle to ask for referrals, often due to doubt. It could stem from low confidence in their competence or uncertainty about their value to the client. Fear of rejection or looking desperate is another possible reason some mortgage pros fail to ask for referrals.

One way to combat doubt or fear is to essentially “get out of your head.” Move the focus from your needs and wants to your prospect’s needs and wants.  

Consider how much value you bring to others’ lives. Your professional financial advice, guidance filled with good intentions, and assistance in taking care of the most significant financial decision most will make in their lives are extraordinarily critical. 

And when you pair that expertise with empathy, your distinction truly becomes invaluable. So Focus less on you, and more on them

Not Communicating or Expressing Appreciation Enough

It’s essential to connect with your partners continuously. Not in a nagging way but in a “fanning the flame” way. Let your referral partners and former clients know how much you appreciate them. Send them valuable communication like:

• Thank you: Send them a card, email, or social media shout-out expressing your appreciation for them.
• Updates: Did you share an upcoming event in your last communication with them? Did they share something that they were anticipating? Send a quick update and ask for an update for some fresh, meaningful engagement.
• Follow-through: Did they ask you for additional information or recommendation? Be sure to follow up with that info on time.

Subpar Service / Not Creating Super Fans

Think about this: which businesses do you recommend more? The ones where you had a good experience or those where you had a great one?

As tough as this may be to hear, most people aren’t thinking about your business as often as you are. They don’t wake up in the morning with the intention of sending you more referrals. They don’t think about how they can work it into a conversation. 

When your clients refer your mortgage services, it’s because they had a positive experience. And if the experience was exceptionally delightful, clients will sing your praises over and over again.

That’s what we call a “superfan.”

Superfans are the gold standard of referral partners. They’re loyal, enthusiastic, and –while they don’t wake up every morning thinking about your business –they WILL make extra effort to reach more people on your behalf. 

Haven’t Perfected The User Experience (UX)

Along the same thread, the best way to create a delightful experience is to make sure the user experience is on point. End-to-end, every touchpoint must simultaneously remove as much friction as possible plus elevate the experience. 

If you are using any of our digital mortgage tools, you know that UX is foundational to our design. This isn’t just a marketing ploy. UX design influences behavior. Everything from where graphics are placed on the screen to how options are displayed to motivating users to complete tasks with prompts and maps has been scientifically studied and proven. 

So if your goal is to create superfans (of course it is), then make sure you’re using mortgage software designed to create superfans. See the UX design of Loanzify POS:

Asking For The Wrong Referrals

It’s happened before. Probably too many times. You ask your client for a referral, they give you one, but nothing happens. Perhaps that person never returned your call or cut you off soon after the first communication. Or maybe they just we’re the right fit. It could be that you asked for the wrong referrals.

This is often the case when you ask the wrong questions. Typically, a loan officer may ask, “do you know anyone who could benefit from my services?” It seems like the right question to ask but the reply often is not honest. Here’s why.

Asking for a referral when they may not be ready to provide one (they haven’t entirely decided) puts them in a spot to give you one anyway. Since they haven’t truly committed to the idea of referring you, they’ll name someone they feel safe with or hold in low regard. 

They do this to protect their reputation. If you happen to falter, the poor experience won’t reflect on them. Instead, be more specific with your request.

“Do you know anyone who is looking to relocate?”

“Are there any veterans in your family? Are they homeowners?”

“Are your parents of retirement age? I’d love to share information on how they can use their equity to supplement their retirement.”

Need more ideas for getting mortgage referrals and building a mortgage business in the digital age? Subscribe to our email list below and never miss an article.

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business, accounting for as much as 65% of new business. However, your former clientele isn’t the only source of referral –you also have realtors! The value of connecting with real estate agents is clear –you share the same consumers and complement each other’s services. 

However, while it’s an obvious avenue for mortgage referrals, few pros know how to get referrals from agents. Fewer still know how to keep a steady stream of qualified leads flowing. 

(Offering to buy them lunch or coffee won’t cut it)

In this article, we’re going to give you three actionable strategies to help you build a robust network of real estate professionals that will enthusiastically refer their homebuyers to you.

Let’s dive in.

How to get more qualified mortgage referrals From Real Estate Agents

Drop The Sales Pitch. Build Relationships.

Realtors are excellent salespeople, so they’ll appreciate a good pitch when they hear one. However, coming off too “sales-y” will have the opposite effect you’re hoping for. You might start to sound like competition, making the agent resistant to anything you might have to offer.

Let’s also remember that realtors are not your end consumers. They’re your colleagues and referral partners.

Here’s how to have a “building a relationship” approach that effortlessly encourages more agents to give you leads:

• Learn about the agent. Research the realtor to know more about their business style, clients they serve, and strengths. Even info about associations, hobbies, or other interests could come in handy when getting to know a potential referral partner. 
• Make the first conversations light. Don’t always talk business. Agents often get approached by loan officers looking to take them out to lunch and explore how they can “partner up.” Don’t be that basic mortgage pro. Instead, keep the first meeting friendly and personal. Congratulate them on a recent accomplishment or other noteworthy bits of news. 
• Share your value (but don’t brag). Casually sharing how many referrals you’re getting and how happy those clients are is a subtle way to hype yourself up without pushing it. It’s also a way of letting them know that you are open to receiving referrals and are successful at seeing it through to completion. 

Partner With Them In Social Media Marketing

Here’s what we know: Real Estate Agents are some of the most active professionals on social media. In fact, an estimated 90% of all 2 million licensed real estate agents use social media for marketing their services regularly.

This fact alone underscores their ability to be powerhouse networkers and your most lucrative ally for getting more qualified referrals. 

The key to getting “in” is not to pitch them, to echo the above point. Instead, you need to focus on creating a reciprocating relationship that genuinely adds as much value to their business as it would to yours. Here are some ideas to get started doing just that:

• Help cross-promote special events like live virtual open house events. 
• You can also offer to participate in the event via chat or live stream to answer questions from participants about home financing. 
• Create real estate-related centered content such as articles, infographics, or videos that you can co-brand with the agent. 
• Better still, have them publish the original content on their site and link back to your site for an additional SEO boost.
• Continuing the spirit of offering free valuable content, reach out to their email list. If you’re not already aware, email lists have one of the highest conversion rates. So if your agent has a list of a few hundred emails that they organically grew, it can prove to be a white-hot lead source. 
• Engage with the agent’s social media. Go beyond just liking every post and take the time to comment with additional insight or echo their sentiment. 

Leverage Your Digital Mortgage Tools and Co-Branding Opportunities

Historically, the real estate profession has been historically an in-person profession –at least when it comes to doing open houses and showing properties to potential buyers. So when the industry was suddenly thrown into virtual-only, it posed a significant challenge. 

Fortunately, it seems that both the industry and consumers have embraced a virtual way of home buying as a welcomed alternative to traditional in-person. And much like in the mortgage industry, technology in real estate is proving to be a significant boost to revenue potential.

As such, real estate agents look to partner with technologically savvy mortgage professionals. Products like our co-brandable mortgage mobile app Loanzify are a popular and valuable tool that agents can easily share with their clients. It’s free for the agent and consumer to use, and it’s packed with resources, information, and interactive tools that lead all users back to you. 

Loanzify POS is another tool you can use to win over more real estate referral partners. Keeping every interested party informed is hard, and miscommunication is a major cause of delayed funding and unhappy customers. With Loanzify POS, the agent can have secure access to the loan file with a pre-determined level of access.  They can also be assigned to specific loans.

From the agent’s admin view can see where the borrower is in their journey to approval and can even download the borrower’s preapproval letter to submit with their offers. 

Real estate agents are a powerful resource for finding quality leads, but only you make a conscious and strategic effort. Remember that when you approach it from building lasting relationships, you make it a win-win for everyone. Make it personal, overdeliver, be social and genuine, and leverage your mortgage technology every chance you get. 

Want to learn more about implementing mortgage tech to win over more referral partners? Click below to try it out for free and schedule a live demo with one of our helpful account executives.

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Santa Ana, Sept 1, 2021 – LenderHomePage today announced a new enterprising integration with loan origination software developer Integra. The powerful partnership between LenderHomePage and Integra furthers their commitment to creating a lending ecosystem that elevates the customer experience and enables mortgage companies to simplify and accelerate the administrative processes of origination.

LenderHomePage, one of the country’s fastest-growing digital mortgage platforms, has been helping mortgage companies adapt quickly to the digital era since 2003. Their family of digital mortgage software products, including the innovative Loanzify POS and Loanzify Mortgage Mobile App, enable mortgage companies of all sizes to create a connected omnichannel experience for mortgage consumers.

The digitization of business systems established new standards for an agile, seamless intake and client management process. These expectations have now migrated to the lending industry, where competitiveness relies heavily on the enterprise’s level of digital transformation.

Recent data shows a strong correlation between improving business-to-business partnerships with technology translate to a 10% to 20% reduction in cost-to-serve, 10% to 15% increase in revenue growth, and an overall increase in employee satisfaction—the integration of Integra with Loanzify POS capitalizes on this phenomenon by enabling a fast-track digital transformation solution. 

Integra offers a complete browser-based LOS system for facilitating the mortgage operation from origination to closing. Integra’s intelligent document management and eligibility engine seamlessly drive data, making origination and fulfillment functions a breeze. Combined with Integra’s sophisticated rule management system, the bi-directional integration with Loanzify POS helps lenders configure and customize their front- and back-end operation, increase their intake capacity, expedite the loan life-cycle, make better-informed underwriting decisions, and increase transparency for all stakeholders. 

“Growing our partner ecosystem and helping our clients adapt to today’s technological demands quickly is one of the keys to our success,” states Rocky Foroutan, CEO of LenderHomePage. “Working with partners like Integra makes deploying intelligent, automated workflows with Loanzify POS simple and swift, thereby improving performance, productivity, and helping mortgage companies deliver an outstanding digital customer experience.”

About Integra:
EPIC LOS by Integra combines over 25 years of lending technology experience to provide lenders with automated compliance across every channel in the mortgage industry, including retail, wholesale, and correspondent. 

About LenderHomePage:
Since 2003, LenderHomePage.com is the leading provider of a secure and compliant cloud-based digital mortgage platform that powers lender websites, mobile apps, and mortgage POS solutions. Mortgage lenders of all sizes use LenderHomePage.com’s customizable and scalable solutions to enhance borrower experience, streamline the mortgage process, and increase Loan Officer productivity and efficiency.

About Loanzify:
Loanzify POS by LenderHomePage is part of a suite of innovative productivity solutions developed for the modern mortgage professional.

SANTA ANA, CA, USA, August 25, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — LenderHomePage today unveiled details of two new features to its premier mortgage point-of-sale platform, Loanzify POS. The newly released Spanish version digital 1003 and CreditConnect self-pay credit pull are breakthrough features designed to help mortgage professionals better serve their markets and exponentially expand revenue opportunities while saving costs.

First launched in 2019, Loanzify POS is a loan management platform that allows individual and enterprise-level originators to increase their production, accelerate the loan lifecycle, and provide a better consumer experience.

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Spanish Version Digital 1003:

Latino population homeownership in 2020 was 49%, up from 45% in 2014, according to a study by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP). This 4% increase is even more notable when considering data from the Urban Institute, where they forecast that Latino consumers will comprise 70% of homeownership growth from 2020-2040 and will serve as the primary engine of the US real estate market.

In response to the exceptional homeownership growth rate that Latinos are experiencing as well as the demand from the industry, LenderHomePage unveiled a Spanish version of their already successful digital mortgage application, part of the Loanzify POS platform. This new release maintains all the features of the English version, including friendly interview-style phrasing, help prompts, and an intelligent UX design with configurable automation and branding capabilities.

Loanzify POS Spanish version digital 1003 provides originators the necessary tools to remain competitive in the market while enabling them to deliver an outstanding borrower experience to the often under-served Latino consumer.

CreditConnect Self-Pay Credit Check:

While digital loan intake and processing significantly reduces loan origination cost, the overall cost per loan still remains high at several thousand per loan. One of the overhead expenses for every loan is the creditworthiness analysis conducted with a credit check. With an average price of $39 per inquiry, each analysis that does not result in a loan becomes an added cost, and in aggregate this number can become significant and reduce an originator’s profits by thousands of dollars every year. If you have a few Loan Officers in your company, this expense can grow even faster, especially in today’s environment of high demand for home financing where a lot of people are still attempting to refinance and/or purchase new homes.

Utilizing eCommerce functionality, Loanzify POS now integrates with payment processors. The first of these is PayPal — one of the most trusted transaction processors — to quickly and securely empower the prospective borrower to self-pay and pull their own credit in real-time and during the application intake, effectively transferring the cost of running a credit report to the consumer. Not only does this reduce potentially thousands of dollars in operational expenses off the top, but it also aids in identifying the “tire-kickers” from the truly motivated mortgage consumers, curtailing costs accrued from dealing with unqualified borrowers.

“Our customers ask and we deliver. That has been our motto for years,” says Rocky Foroutan, CEO of LenderHomePage.com. “One of the most fulfilling parts of my job is when I get on the phone with a client and we co-invent a new feature for our platform,” Foroutan added. “Both of these features were direct requests by our clients and now are powerful tools added to our software. We are glad we were able to once again meet our clients’ expectations.”

For more information, visit LenderHomePage.com.

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