Mortgage loan officers are no strangers to burnout. Your job consists of ensuring the client applies for a loan that fits their needs best, that their loan gets on the track of approval, and that they are satisfied with the process in between. Essentially what that means is that you function as the sole standing link between your client and their future (or, at least their future living situation).
You are expected to maintain a clear head, strategic approach and wide smile all the time, no matter that your days basically consist of calculations, calls, meetings, and a whole bunch of paperwork. Mishaps at work are not uncommon, but in the mortgage industry – mishaps could be devastating, for both your client and your own mental health and business.
What can you do to ensure you don’t grow to resent your career choice as a mortgage loan officer in the long run? Keep on reading, because we bundled together a list of best practices for avoiding burnout as a loan officer below.
Step back to refocus
According to research, 78% of mortgage loan officers work indoors every day, and with the average workweek stretching beyond 40 hours – that’s a lot of screen time! Your eyes need rest from the documents, numbers, monitors, and even your enclosed office. Yet, ever so often, you may get tempted to bring your work laptop with you after your shift and continue where you left off.
If you take your work with you when you leave the office to try and do more work at home, you probably won’t get more done. In fact, studies have shown that overworking correlates with less productivity.
The best way to actually be productive at work is (contradictingly) to work less. You may initially be afraid of things like missing an important call after your shift, but your clients would rather work with a loan officer who completes a week’s worth of work in exactly one week than one who completes work within two days – but makes errors on crucial details due to lack of focus.
When talking about his burnout journey, Trevor Hammond from Sierra Pacific Mortgage explained that he realized his clients were not hiring loan officers just to get a mortgage. Clients are paying loan officers for their creativity and problem-solving skills, all of which are nearly impossible without a healthy work-life balance.
So, step back to refocus. Use your time off to take long walks, spend time with friends and family, or just lounge on the couch – whatever helps you recharge your batteries.
Set clear boundaries
Stepping back doesn’t only mean sticking to your work hours – it also means organizing your time during your work hours. So what happens when you set a perfect time management flow that works for you, but you have a client who regularly pops in at all hours, messing with your carefully crafted routine?
If you clearly stated to the client that they can reach you via email to set up further meetings, but they keep showing up at your office every day unannounced, you’ll never have enough time to get their loan application going, let alone focus on your other clients (or your core business).
Show that you’re there to help, and maybe even give in, in the odd instance or two where it’s needed, but don’t make it seem like you are your client’s 24/7 personal assistant. They will keep asking questions that are outside of your scope of work, showing up for unplanned consultations, and have the habit of calling you each time they get even just a little anxious (holidays and weekends included). If your client can’t respect your workflow, then perhaps even the right thing to do is to cancel the collaboration.
The same applies to taking on clients when you have no more capacity, even if they come from a referral and you feel like you owe it to your partner to take them in. Turning down prospects sounds like something that will damage your business, but the damage of becoming burned out working with needy clients and receiving negative reviews could be irreversible.
Goals and milestones
Instead of viewing each client and mortgage loan as a whole, divide the process into smaller goals and milestones. You can go a step further and reward yourself after each goal you meet.
For example, your first goal could be setting up a call with a client who reached out to you for your services. Instead of dwelling on how you will cram in all the work that may follow, focus solely on having the call, listening to the brief, and sealing the deal.
After that’s done, your second goal could be gathering the client’s financial information. Until you get that wrapped up, leave the research and the actual mortgage loan application on the back burner.
Breaking up your workload and focusing on individual sections of the process hierarchically will help avoid the mistake of trying to simultaneously plan and focus on multiple things at once. It will also reduce the anxiety you may feel thinking about how much work you have left.
Think of a car ride as an analogy; instead of driving through the night from the introduction to reporting on loan approval/rejection without any breaks, stop at the intersection of your client’s financial history and mortgage loan options. Consider the next stop you need to get to before thinking about reaching the end destination.
Don’t be afraid to seek help
If you’re an independent loan officer, being a one-man-show can get overwhelming rather quickly. There’s a tendency in the entrepreneurial world to be the sole standing face of your business. The growth opportunities, however, reach a limit rather quickly, and that limit is the capacity that you as an individual have in terms of how much work you can handle.
Seeking help is the best step towards managing your workload as a loan officer, growing your business, and, subsequently, avoiding burnout in the process.
Delegating, outsourcing, introducing turnkey software and platforms for mortgage professionals, and even mentoring and coaching are all ways you can step away from (or streamline) day-to-day operations that tire you and gain some breathing room for the things you actually love.
Stop comparing yourself to others
Sometimes, we might feel the need to be a workaholic in order to succeed and be better than our competition. In theory, that’s not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it would be odd if we never strived to grow in our field and if we didn’t have people in the industry we looked up to.
The problem arises when our inspiration becomes an obsession, and we fall into the imposter syndrome trap. For loan officers, this means that you no longer look at the bigger picture of which of your competitors has an overall better business and why, but you instead start looking at the numbers.
One has more clients than you do, the other has turned over twice as much profit as you did last year, while the third wraps up the loan application process twice as fast as you do. Seeing this may prompt you to rush and discard all your healthy practices in order to chase the numbers, which could produce a counter-effect.
Are your clients happy with your work? Do you make enough profit to comfortably sustain your business and your personal lifestyle? Do you have a good reputation? Do you enjoy what you do? Don’t ruin it just for the sake of saying you achieved more than somebody else.
If you feel like you have the time and energy to grow your business, make a personal vision board of where you stand, what your capacities are, and where you can be with the resources you have in stock. Setting unrealistic expectations to be “better” than someone else is the surefire path to failure.
What are the things you do that help you avoid burnout as a loan officer? Share them with us in the comments below!
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