If it can be done once, it can be done again and again
In many ways, the disruption that’s been happening in the mortgage industry over the past couple of years is now being seen in the real estate industry, and that has some realtors uncertain about their future.
As the industry is transformed, realtors are looking for the people that they trust more than anyone else, who they know can get them business, and take care of not only their clients, but their income from every single transaction.
One of the best ways to build trust is to build what former originator Danny Horanyi calls a “referable experience,” which is a repeatable process that goes all the way from lead generation through transaction management. At the AIME Mortgage Expert Workshop in Irvine, California, Horanyi explained that his team inserted touch points at the emotional leverage points of the process.
“That is your unique superpower, is the ability to connect with the human beings that you’re actually doing business with and the families that you’re doing business with,” he said.
Those touch points are at the point of preapproval, at the point of contract acceptance, at contingency removal if a state requires it, and then at closing. Clients come to connect the originator with those positive experience in their home buying journey.
“We essentially built this process around those emotional leverage points to ensure that our ability to communicate our value was really maximized and their attention span around our value point proposition was magnified,” Horanyi said.
When a repeatable process is put in place, a predictable experience is sure to follow, and that’s something that the client can trust, believe in, and count on.
Top producer Shashank Shekhar advises originators that they need to become “the Amazon Prime of mortgages.” When someone orders something from Amazon Prime, he said, they know the item will be at their door within two days; it’s a predictable experience. Mortgage loan origination should be no different.
“It’s my eleventh year of doing business, with almost $1 billion in closing, we haven’t issued one preapproval letter—ever—that got declined in underwriting. That’s how good this preapproval letter is. That’s predictable experience. When you get into contract and we say we’ll close in 25 days, we are closing in 25 days. That’s predictable experience,” Shekhar said. “You need to build systems and processes with your team . . . whatever your volume is, whatever your current status is in terms of your team size, there’s no reason why your entire process should not be mapped and should not be predictable.”
And when borrowers come to associate an originator with a positive, predictable process, that experience will keep them coming back.
Imagine the sales funnel as starting with lead generation, lead conversion, and transaction management. The bulk of the cost is generally spent on lead generation, Horanyi said, whether it’s buying leads or taking realtors out to lunch. But, he adds, if originator can convert leads and manage the transactions well and in a predictable, repeatable way, those borrows go right back into being a convertible lead, instead of having to start back at the top of the funnel and acquire them again.
“Instead of going back to the point where you have to spend all the money again to get them to go through your experience, they already know what you do, they trust what you do and they want what you do. You no longer have to put them through that hamster wheel and your business can incrementally grow over time, and it’s something that you can be really proud of,” he said.
For strategies from top originators, come to Anaheim on April 4th for our Power Originating session featuring Shant Banosian, Ben Anderson, and Oleg Tkach.
