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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The goal of boosting your loan volume without increasing your payroll may seem like an impossible task, but you’re closer to achieving it than you realize. With a few strategic pivots –some in behavior and some involving adding mortgage software — you’ll be able to massively increase your loan volume without so much as adding an intern. 

Seem too good to be true? Read on to find out how close you are…

How To Increase Loan Volume Without Increasing Your Staff

Revamp Your Business Model

In modern lending, the market moves fast and change is constant. Ensuring that your business is agile enough to keep up with the shifts is vital to scaling your volume. That said, has your business model changed since the beginning of 2020? Are you stuck in the mindset of making do until things go “back to normal?” Are you or is your remote team struggling to find harmony in workflow? 

If you find that your loan volume growth is stagnant, the positive buzz about your business has grown silent, and your top producers are jumping ship, then it’s time to revamp your business model. Here are areas to focus on:

• Evaluate your business processes –really drill down on the loan cycle every step it takes to acquire, nurture, and close a loan.
• Revisit your key partnerships.
• Consider your target prospect –have you lost touch with who they are and what their buying habits are?
• Reassess the business values and goals. How can you better align your business to match those points?
• Reevaluate your lead generation strategy – Digital marketing for mortgage businesses is an ever-evolving practice and requires regular updates to your mortgage marketing strategy.
• Freshen up your branding to help boost interest from prospects and reignite enthusiasm from your employees.

Improve Operational Efficiency

One strategy that consistently leads to dramatic growth is improving operational efficiency. It’s estimated that most organizations bleed about 20% of their potential profits due to time mismanagement and an organization’s poor implementation of technology –both of which add up to operational deficiency.  

Now, when we say time mismanagement, understand that we’re not talking about staff scrolling through Instagram when they should be following up on leads. Rather, we’re talking about bigger time-suckers like remedial manual tasks like data entry or changing a document from one format to another before submitting. There’s also the huge mistake of having loan officers do your mortgage marketing, pulling their time and attention away from processing loans. We talked in-depth about that folly in a previous article.

When it comes to poor implementation of technology, there are several areas that you can improve on to 10x your loan volume. Consider the following critical areas:

• Refine the process -Assess whether you currently have the digital tools required to operate at a higher volume level. Examine how efficient your day-to-day operations are well as look for any gaps in the workflow.
• Automate repeatable tasks – Like mentioned above, weeding out work-intensive processes by reducing unnecessary data entry means your mortgage team gets more done with less effort. In addition to increasing their intake, mortgage automation also speeds up the closing timeline. 
• Consolidate communication –Communication is essential to operate efficiently but often too much time is devoted to answering emails, making phone calls, and attending meetings when the same can be achieved with less active effort. Instead, make use of software like a mortgage POS with a client portal. With a mortgage POS acting as a hub of operations, the assigned mortgage team can access the information and documentation they need. Notifications alert you of any changes to the loan file and communications from email and instant messaging are automatically archived and organized for easy retrieval. 

Elevate Your Borrower Experience

Increasing the number of leads is worth nothing if they don’t translate to more loans, and that’s where improving your borrower experience can make all the difference. McKinsey’s insights found that, on average, organizations that work on bettering their customer experience increase their revenue by 10-15% while simultaneously lowering their costs by 15-20%. These higher rates ring especially true in financial services. 

Thanks to technology, a remarkable experience doesn’t require building a whole new customer service department. Do the following to elevate your borrower experience:

• Be proactive –Have an omnichannel digital presence. That way wherever the consumer is on the web and whatever stage they are in the borrower journey, there’s a touchpoint that leads them back to you.
• Have open communication –While consumers readily embrace a digital mortgage, the lack of a human element can leave them feeling unsettled. Remove this barrier by providing multiple channels of communication such as in-app or website instant messaging, group chats, video calls, SMS reminders, and the like.
• User-friendly tech –Delicate processes like online loan applications can overwhelm and frustrate even the most tech-savvy consumer. Eliminate this stress by using mortgage tech that has a dynamic and modern interface. Bonus points if it’s branded too!

It’s entirely possible to 10x your loan volume and grow your business without hiring new staff. By looking for ways to maximize your current team, update your business structure, reallocate your time, and implement technology, you’ll find that taking your business to the next level without increasing your payroll is achievable.

Keeping that pipeline filled with new qualified leads is one of the biggest challenges that brokerages face daily, and marketing plays a critical role in making that happen. However, many mistakenly hand this crucial task to their LOs or office staff, thinking that it’ll be just as effective (or cost-efficient) to do so. 

But having your LOs take responsibility for mortgage marketing could be costing you more than you realize. 

If you want your LOs to increase their loan volume, you must take marketing off of their plate and pass it on to a professional marketer. Here’s why:

1. A professional marketer will free up LO time so they can focus on processing loans
2. A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy
3. A professional marketer is easier to manage and will deliver better results.

In this age, it’s no longer a question of whether a brokerage needs to do digital marketing but rather how serious they are at getting results. A healthy benchmark for effective marketing would be that it accounts for about 20-30% of your total pipeline. Are you near that benchmark? How much time are you willing to have your LOs dedicate to reaching that goal? 

By answering those two questions, you’ll start to get a better idea of how significant and costly the problem is to have your LOs take responsibility for your business marketing. Let’s take a deeper look at why you need to remove marketing from their to-do list, and give it to the capable hands of a professional mortgage marketer. 

Mortgage Marketing Powered by LenderHomPage

A professional marketer will free up LO time to process More loans.

Many business owners have a “Do-It-Yourself” type of mentality. While admirable and essential to business start-ups, requiring your LOs to have this same mentality regarding marketing will end up backfiring, and here’s why. Firstly, marketing takes knowledge of how marketing works, how to design a marketing strategy, and how to execute it. Essentially, when you require your LO to take on marketing, you make them take on a second career. 

How well do you think they’ll execute? 

How long do you think it’ll take them to complete the necessary tasks? This leads us to our second point…

Even with an experienced marketing team at the helm, implementing the strategy takes time. Considering the 40-hour workweek, how many of those hours are you willing to take away from lead nurturing and loan processing to have your LO make a rudimentary effort in mortgage marketing?

A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy.

The rise of the digital age has reinvented many aspects of marketing, and with algorithms constantly evolving, competitors altering their campaigns, market changes, and consumers shifting their online behaviors, your approach must also adapt. 

That includes modernizing every aspect of your inbound mortgage marketing strategy. Below is a partial list of tasks that entail a “modern marketing strategy”:

• Website development or redesign
• Branding
• Graphic design
• SEO/keyword research
• Content development
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Local market research
• Mobile marketing integration
• Print marketing development and production
• Paid advertising
• Metrics and data analysis
• Public relations
• Video creation and marketing

While this is an extensive list, it’s not exhaustive. Remember that innovative technology, apps, and marketing disciplines are constantly being created. It’s challenging enough to train an LO into a top producer –do you really want her also to try to keep up with the latest in marketing? 

A professional marketer is Easier to Manage with better results.

When you hire a mortgage marketing agency, you get access to a team of expert copywriters, graphic designers, social media marketers, SEO professionals, PPC strategists, web designers, plus managers to coordinate it all. Is this something you want your loan officers or business to take on?

While some are tempted to take their marketing in-house, that’s not always the best way to go, especially for mortgage businesses. For mortgage businesses, the cost of recruiting and training a new marketing department could be prohibitive. And that rings true for both individual and multi-branch firms. 

So unless you’re in the business of marketing, it’s best to focus on lending and leave the marketing to the experts.

The Bottom Line

Marketing is both essential and a necessary expense. That’s right –there’s a cost for marketing and lead generation. Some falsely believe that they can eliminate or reduce the cost by their LOs do the marketing. But as you now can see, you’ll end up paying much more. When you shift the responsibility of marketing from your LO to a marketing professional, you’ll have beefed up your revenue streams from both your lead generation side and your lead nurturing side. 

Ready to make that happen? Click here to schedule a conversation with our redesigned mortgage marketing services. 

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The definition of a brand can be boiled down to how the public perceives you, so a personal brand isn’t necessarily built around a business or even with the goal of building a business. A personal brand is built around you -encapsulating your strengths, your expertise, and your style. Because a personal brand is essentially created from scratch and is unique to you, you can leverage this power to support your mortgage business and act as a brand ambassador to the business brand.

An example of this can be found in Richard Branson. The billionaire adventurer has a well-known personal brand and uses it to complement his business brand, Virgin. Another example can be found with Oprah as she uses her personal brand as part of her multi-channel media empire, Harpo. 

The main takeaway is that while different from business brands, personal brands are powerful, influential assets –especially to mortgage businesses.

Personal Brand: Becoming An Ambassador to Your Mortgage Business

Highlight Your Accomplishments

Make an even more compelling case for the company’s expertise in the industry by sharing your experience, certifications, associations, and education. Letting prospects know about your ten years of experience in the mortgage industry or your bachelor’s degree in business administration goes a long way in building your mortgage business’ trustworthiness and professionalism. 

Non-business accomplishments are also great ways to trump up your mortgage business. Items like completing an Iron Man marathon or restoring a classic car to be showroom ready hint at your perseverance and commitment to excellence –admirable characteristics that are subliminally attractive to mortgage prospects. 

Make Social Media “Follow” Worthy

Individuals will follow social media accounts for various reasons, such as for humor, inspiration, advice, news, or connection. A personally branded social media profile can add another dimension to the business’s social media presence and could often hook the viewer much more readily than a business brand might be able to.

You can expand the hero story by sharing the journey on your brand social profile. For example, let’s say that several of your mortgage team decided to do the Iron Man marathon. You might post 1-2 images of them doing the race, sharing how proud the company is of these team members.

However, the personal brand can delve deeper into the journey of getting ready for the race, unfolding a hero story that resonates with followers. Thus, the personal brand compels the audience to invest emotionally, which causes them to invest emotionally into the business brand. 

Reflect Company Culture and Values

Along the same thread, a personal brand allows prospective clients to see the business culture and values in action. Sharing involvement in social causes that matter to you, such as volunteering at a local rescue mission or literacy program, demonstrates true passion and shows that community building is more than just lip service.

A personal brand also reveals true enthusiasm in providing mortgage services. A mortgage business comprised of earnest, joyful, and savvy professionals draw positive attention from all fronts.

A personal brand also reveals true enthusiasm in providing mortgage services.

Choose Both Personal and Business Brand

Having a personal brand doesn’t mean it needs to compete with the business brand. They are complementary and extend one another’s reach. So instead of thinking you need to choose one over the other, harness the influence of both to boost your mortgage business above the competition.

Check out our new personal brand mortgage templates to co-promote your mortgage business. 

Personal Brand Templates

Getting a website online for any business is relatively easy nowadays, there are several quick and cheap options. But a website that’s also a hub of your business –central to lead nurturing, acquisition, branding, marketing, and Borrower Experience requires another level of sophistication. 

In this week’s post, we’re going to show you exactly how to create a mortgage website that meets all of these criteria, plus how you launch an attractive, professional, high-functioning mortgage website in less than five minutes. 

Best Mortgage Website Building Practices

Website Creation: Pictures and Text Are Not Enough

A quick search on launching a website will bring you over 360 million results, with the top generic website builders being Wix and Squarespace. But that’s just it –they’re generic. While the general design and launching are fast, the appearance is still bland, and its functionality is miles away from where it should be for a professional mortgage website. 

Of course, there’s much more to it. There’s also the matter of search engine optimization, content for conversion, and Borrower Experience. By the end, you’ll have the ability to decipher a generic website from a high-level mortgage website and know how to go about creating a mortgage website that supports your business needs, meets online ending industry standards, and modern consumer buying habits.

Responsive 

Responsive design is often mistaken for simply adjusting to the screen. While this may have been innovative ten years ago, modern responsive websites must also adapt their functionality. That means that items like lead capture forms, menus, videos, and any integrated 3rd-party applications must work and view properly without any effort from the user. No matter the device or operating system, the best mortgage websites are built for this level of user experience from the ground up.

Modern and Branded Mortage Design

As mentioned above, although there are plenty of clean website designs possible with generic website builders, a mortgage website that reflects modern design principles and the flexibility to brand is key to making your online business front stand out and above the rest. 

When it comes to designing, mortgage website templates from LenderHomePage offer a powerful and fast jumping-off point. With 45 attractive prebuilt mortgage designs, mortgage professionals of all sizes –from individual to multi-branch –can easily find a site that reflects their business. 

With some simple adjustments to the color scheme and the addition of your logo, both of which can be done without coding and matched your POS platform, your mortgage website will have a dynamically branded look and feel across the entire Borrower Experience.

Interactive Mortgage Tools

Online mortgage consumers crave an immersive and personalized shopping experience and interactive mortgage tools on your website are how to deliver this experience. Accurate to their location and loan program, online mortgage tools such as our mortgage calculators estimate down to the penny and move curious borrowers deeper through your lead nurturing strategy.

SEO Mortgage Copy

Search engine optimized copy is a precise craft of persuasive writing combined with researched keywords. This particular combination is aimed at helping to position your website for both a high-ranking organic search position and high conversion rates. This means that the words and the formatting must meet specific standards for search engines and consumers.

If you’d like to attempt it yourself, reach this previous article where we give a brief overview on how to DIY your mortgage SEO copy. Otherwise, we recommend taking advantage of our mortgage marketing services with professional and custom mortgage SEO content.

High-Value Content

Along the same lines as SEO copywriting is high-value mortgage content. The mortgage content can come in articles, videos, graphics, e-books, or white papers and, as expected, doesn’t come as part of any generic website design. 

While custom high-value content comes with additional costs, our mortgage website templates come with hundreds of pages of mortgage articles that can be edited as you see fit –or launch as is! Need additional help and resources? We got you covered. Our team of marketers is available for custom mortgage content and strategy development to guide how to make the best use of it on your website. 

Seamless Integration with Digital 1003 and POS

Last but not least, a mortgage website needs a seamless integration with your digital 1003 and POS. In today’s touchless environment, your mortgage website is more than an online presence –it’s also the hub of the Borrower Experience, and that includes your digital 1003 and mortgage POS platform. More than placing a simple link, integrating all the three platforms in such a way that captured leads, is branded, and is intuitively functional is vital to your competitive advantage. 

Want to see all this in action for free? Sign up for a free trial. Click here to get started –no credit card required! In only 14 days, you’ll be convinced that our mortgage website templates and support team are immensely better than what any generic website can offer. 

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We’ve compiled a list of the topmost relevant, and useful online courses mortgage professionals need to thrive and grow their mortgage business to the next level. From digital marketing to customer service to branding strategies, these upper-level online courses are taught by professionals at the top of their game and will give you the launching platform you need to grow your business. 

Need more resources for scaling and completing your digital transformation? We got you covered! Explore our stackable and brandable digital mortgage platform that grows with your business. 

Leadership Assessment and Development 

This course by Udemy is a 2-hour deep dive into exploring and developing your leadership skills. More than the typical “business leader approach,” this course is a great foundation for growing a mortgage business and shows you how to create a resilient work culture and leadership mentality within your team to promote innovation, accountability, profitability, and loyalty. Learn more.

Performance Experts 

Taught by one of the nation’s top fifty producers of loan origination, Tim Braheem offers several coaching programs in an exclusive small group, online settings. His Leadership 360 course is open only once a year to 9 members are takes mortgage professionals through a year-long business and life coaching program to teach mortgage professionals how to build a sustainable business model that complements the desire for personal fulfillment. Learn more.

CORE Training 

Taught by trio Rick Ruby, Todd Scrima, and Reeta Casey, this program focuses primarily on leveraging healthy competitiveness within your workforce to elevate the entire team. There are three levels to this program, with the first requiring a 12-month commitment and comes with the promise of doubling your business after successful completion. Learn more.

Social Media and Digital Advertising 2021

Offered by the respected Mortgage Banker’s Association (MBA), this webinar provides upper-level insight into digital marketing and social media marketing for the mortgage industry in 2021 and beyond. With legal compliance, consumer trends, and evolving digital etiquette, knowing how to market your business is challenging. This course can be completed in a single session and will provide a solid foundation for establishing and maintaining a professional mortgage digital presence. Learn more.

Aligning Customer Experience with Company Culture

Offered by one of Linkin’s featured professionals, customers service expert Davide Brownlee provides insight into the customer journey. He shows you how the mortgage professional can add value to each phase to create an exceptional customer experience that results in happier clients, a supportive and satisfying work environment, and increased profit. Learn more.

Marketing Foundations: Automation

Named as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, Jon Chang teaches the foundations of automation in marketing, how to use it to drive efficiency, identify marketing opportunities, and develop retargeting ad campaigns with high conversion rates. The self-directed course has several case studies and can be completed in a day. Learn more.

Sales: Closing a Complex Sale

This 5-module course is a fast-track program for improving sales and closing skills. It helps originators understand the buyer’s dilemmas and offers solutions to simplify the buyer’s journey and value proposition. Taught by Jeff Bloomfield, trusted sales strategist and executive coach to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies. Learn more.

Advanced Mortgage Loan Processor: Essential Skills Training

Gain a more profound knowledge of mortgage processing with this essential skills training course. This program is perfect for the loan officer looking to branch out on his own or work independently alongside banks or lenders. Even seasoned brokers will find the lessons helpful in expanding their practice and training up a top-producing mortgage team. Learn more.

Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign

Go beyond the basics set up of Google ads and learn how to plan, execute, and optimize for mortgage lead generation. Taught by Google, this one-hour seminar will introduce you to the advanced features of Google’s ad platform and prepare you for creating powerful mortgage ads on both local and national levels. Offered on a rotating basis so check the calendar for the next available date. Learn more.

Brand Management by UCLA Extension

This higher-level 11-week course offered by working professionals is part of UCLA’s Extention program. Available in 100% online format, you’ll learn the development and application of a business brand and how to leverage this power to differentiate yourself from the competition. This course is ideal for mortgage brokers who are aggressively scaling their businesses. Learn more.