It’s no surprise to anyone in the industry that the real estate and mortgage landscape is changing rapidly, resulting in 2022 being a challenging year for the housing market. After two years of low interest rates, soaring home prices, and dwindling inventory, it’s been quite the ride for MLOs. However, as interest rates rise and the market cools a bit, mortgage lenders may find they have a bit more downtime than in the past couple of years. While it’s not ideal for business to slow down, we here at focusIT think the slowdown offers an opportunity for lenders to take advantage of potential downtime by improving their internal processes, marketing strategy, and communications.
Take Stock of Current Businesses Processes + Marketing
When was the last time you examined the end-to-end process in your business? Is now the time to address these issues? We think so.
Some questions to ask:
- Does your technology harmonize together?
- How many processes require manual intervention?
- Are there manual processes that can be automated?
- Can you optimize tasks by finding the most efficient, low-cost method to accomplish the task?
- How do you measure results that impact profitability, efficiency, and productivity?
- What does your online presence look like? Could your website use a refresh?
- Are you active on social media?
- What’s your current communication strategy with current and past borrowers?
As the pandemic most definitely changed how we work and conduct business, it’s clear that both young and old homebuyers now expect a digital experience that can be initiated and completed fully online. Quite often, the search for a mortgage professional begins online (even after a referral). To keep your business relevant in the current, more competitive climate, now’s the time to evaluate your business processes, online presence and find where you can streamline, automate and set yourself apart from the competition.
Make Changes Online
When looking at your online presence, think about positioning yourself as a trusted resource for borrowers when they’re searching for answers about loans, mortgage rates, refinancing, and more. Some ways to do that via your social media platforms, email newsletters, and website:
- If you want to help your buyers make it through the market shift, you have to get in front of the gossip and constantly share the latest insights.
- Explain how those insights reflect your local market and affect them directly.
- People don’t like to be sold to. What they do love to be is educated. As the market continues to change, people are looking for reliable information. This is where you come in.
- Get in front of the numerous (and sometimes conflicting) news stories swirling around mortgage rates and the industry today – the best way to do that is to fill your social feeds, your blog, your emails, and your follow-up texts with information that shows you’re knowledgeable, personable and professional.
- Trust is such an important factor for borrowers and you need to take the time to listen and understand who your clients are, what they’re looking for, and how you can help them. The more you know about your consumer, the more relevant you become.
- 67% of consumers have used social media for customer service, and with the ability to keep your connections updated instantly and provide quick responses, there is an opportunity to outdo your competitors who don’t do as well in the social game.
- Building and maintaining this trust across all of your platforms helps with customer retention. Not only does it suit the current climate of the mortgage industry, but generally in business, it costs a lot less to retain a customer than it does to acquire a new one – five times less, so aim to retain!
Automate + Personalize Communications
One way to help accomplish some of the above is by nurturing customer relationships with personalization. Sound time-consuming? It’s not! Sending highly relevant and personalized emails to your clients can make a huge difference between emails that get opened and emails that get moved straight to the trash, untouched. Email is direct, it allows you to be reactive and demonstrate how your brand is invested in your client’s individual needs, and allows you a way to build better relationships more quickly than with other channels. If this isn’t something you’ve been doing, now is a great time to get cranking!
However, we’re not expecting you to go through your client list one by one and start having conversations specific to each of their needs. This would be a highly ineffective use of your time and quite literally a full-time job for someone in the office as you wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
Although we’re talking about personalization, many automation tools include this as a feature. With the power of automated reminders and emails, marketing automation lets you take a proactive approach to nurturing your customer relationships, without having to spend an arduous amount of time or effort.
As you evaluate your business processes, if you find a gap in your marketing and communication efforts, give us a call! We know you have a lot on your plate and our Pulse marketing software can take a big chunk off of that plate with automated marketing messages, texts, reminders, and more. As with all of the above suggestions, now’s the ideal time to make sure you’re working smarter, not harder so you can focus on bringing in new business in an increasingly competitive market.
Have more questions? Feel free to contact our sales team. We’re always happy to help.
Have you started to think about your current business processes and how they might need to change? We’d love to hear. Let us know in the comments below!
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