Marketing and support have changed his origination game
When you work at a place like Guaranteed Rate, you have a lot of support to help you thrive as an originator. Dan Gjeldum has experienced that support firsthand, and that’s one of the factors that helped him close $106,104,384 in 2017.
A large part of Gjeldum’s success, however, has to do with how he gets business and the knowledge that he and his team possesses. He works with a number of financial advisors around the country, whether they’re independent advisors or advisors that are tied to banks.
“Private wealth managers within banks often times will turn to me for ‘the need for speed,’ because we can close loans faster than anybody else can in the market. So they’ll turn to us for that, but they’ll also turn to us for the expertise around trusts, around estate planning measures, around the tax law changes, we know IRS rules, we’re fully versed in things like that which separates us from your normal mortgage professional.”
Gjeldum said that they’ll get referrals from random financial advisors because their friends, either at their company or in their sphere of influence, had a great experience with his team. More often than not, these transactions are on the higher end, which is exactly where Gjeldum has positioned himself right now.
He’s been in the mortgage business for more than 20 years, and now works pretty consistently with high net worth clients and jumbo loans, of which his average loan amount is over half a million dollars. And once that happens, he said, it feeds into itself.
“Once you get into that jumbo space, if you do a good job at it and execute well, you’ll get referrals. Your clients, the higher net worth clients, hang out with higher net worth people.”
There’s all of the other stuff that goes into successful origination as well, such as delegation, not trying to do everything, and having a confident team behind you, so assistants and processors can take over once the file’s in process. In other words, step back and stay out of the processing team’s way.
In this vein, Guaranteed Rate has what’s called the “Mortgage Pod” model, where every originator has a set of specialists to support them and their loans. Everyone has a job, and works within their individual lanes to get everyone to the finish line.
“Everybody’s got a defined set of things that they do . . . if the pod model went away, or I went to a different company and I didn’t have that model, that would definitely have an impact [on my business] because my referral partners know who to contact at what point in the process. Our clients are introduced to our team to know exactly who to call,” Gjeldum said.
Gjeldum also has a production manager whose job is to “essentially quarterback the operations side of things” but also has the flexibility to get involved on the sales side, essentially managing the pipeline from 10,000 feet. This frees up time for originators to originate, and everyone within the pod benefits from more origination.
More origination is always the goal, and it’s something that Gjeldum said he missed out on earlier in his career. He didn’t always do a great job when it came to staying in touch with and in front of past clients, and even though his approach has improved greatly over the years, he had many missed opportunities with clients who fell through the cracks while he was going after new ones.
“Thinking back, there’s always talk about mining your database, and it’s definitely something I need to do a better job of. I needed to do it in years past, going all the way back to the late 90s. If I did a better job of it, I’m confident that I wouldn’t be at a different place in my career, but my volume would be double what it is now.”
Apart from doing a better job mining his database, Gjeldum says that on a daily basis, his biggest struggle recently has been battling margin compression and banks becoming more active in offering competitive rates that can be even lower than what the more traditional mortgage banking companies can offer.
“That’s definitely become a challenge, but that’s where process and approach definitely sets you apart. Our volume hasn’t slowed down at all even though when you look at companies across the country and you see companies that are now looking to sell, owners want to get out, things like that, because the margins are getting so thin that there’s really not a whole lot of money to be made in the space. So we’re battling that, but it also allows us to expand market share.”
