Key Takeaways
- To succeed in the competitive mortgage industry, it’s essential to offer value to your clients, understand your borrowers’ financial situations, and establish yourself as an expert in the field.
- Keeping up-to-date with industry changes and trends, as well as managing your clients’ expectations and schedules, can help improve your closing rates.
- Making connections with real estate professionals, growing your team, and taking advantage of automation and CRM can streamline your workload and improve productivity.
- Regular follow-ups, proactive problem-solving, and focusing on pre-qualification and approval can help ensure a successful loan closing.
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How to close more mortgage loans
The mortgage industry is highly competitive and, while there is never a shortage of homebuyers and borrowers looking for the right loan, you need to develop strong mortgage sales techniques in order to stay ahead of your competition. In order to do this, it is essential to create a personal experience for your buyers that fosters a strong relationship based on trust and expertise. Here we look at some top mortgage sales techniques that can help you rise above the competition and close more deals.
1. Provide value to homebuyers and borrowers
When you first connect with new contacts, you don’t want to begin the relationship by begging them to choose you as their lender for their home loan. Instead, you want to offer value to all your prospective clients. But how do you offer value? By sharing your industry knowledge, helping them understand the mortgage process, or showing that you understand their specific situation, you provide a valuable resource while making yourself an indispensable part of their buying process.
2. Understand your borrowers and local market
Successfully closing loans has a lot to do with understanding each borrower’s unique financial situation and risk, while also having a deep understanding of your current housing market conditions. When you have a clear picture of both, it makes it easier to determine a borrower’s mortgage risk when it comes to approval.
3. Establish yourself as a mortgage industry expert
Buying a new home is a huge commitment for borrowers. When choosing a loan officer, they want to know that the person they choose is an industry expert and knows what they are talking about. Establishing yourself as a mortgage industry expert highlights your knowledge and offers a piece of mind to new leads and clients. Offering regular blog content on industry topics, providing educational classes for homeowners, or even sharing a monthly mortgage industry newsletter can help offer valuable information while highlighting your extensive knowledge.
4. Continue to grow your mortgage industry knowledge
The mortgage industry is always changing and, as an industry expert, it is important that you stay on top of current changes. Taking continuing education classes or attending trade seminars is a great way to continue learning. In addition, other aspects of your business can change as well. For example, marketing strategies come and go. Staying on top of current trends and changes can provide an additional boost to your lead generation, customer engagement, and closings.
5. Strive to exceed expectations
When working with clients, be sure to only promise what you KNOW you can deliver. By keeping expectations and promises realistic, you are often able to exceed these expectations and impress your clients in the long run, often boosting your closing percentages as well as your referrals.
6. Use social media to your advantage
While managing multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, may seem overwhelming, the fact is if you aren’t taking advantage of social media, then you are missing out. Regular engagement through posts, videos, and direct replies to comments on social media platforms is a great way to engage with potential borrowers and reach new homebuyers. In addition, you can take advantage of many social media paid marketing opportunities to further extend your social media reach. Once in place, many of these tasks can be automated with the right programs.
7. Make connections with realtors and real estate agents
Connecting with other professionals in your industry is a great way to gain knowledge that you can share with potential clients to help them better understand the home-buying process. Building professional relationships with real estate agents, home inspectors, and other professionals in the mortgage industry opens up the doors to referrals, lead generation, and more closings in the long run.
8. Understand and respect your client’s schedule
While your office hours may follow a traditional 9 to 5 schedule, you have to understand that many of your clients work that same schedule, making face-to-face meetings or phone calls difficult. In this case, it is important to think outside of the box. This can mean creating video messages to send for them to watch on their own time or creating an open schedule throughout the week that provides open hours for all your clients. This flexibility provides an added benefit to choosing you over your competition.
9. Grow your team
As an independent mortgage loan originator, it can be overwhelming to try and manage marketing strategies, networking, meeting with clients, and closing. It may seem impossible to focus on improving closing rates when you are being pulled in every direction. For many, marketing alone feels like a full-time job. In this situation, it may be beneficial to your business development to consider creating or expanding your team and hiring an assistant, marketing specialist, or an entire sales team that can take over those aspects of your business while allowing you to focus on customer relationships and closings.
10. Take advantage of automation
If an assistant is not an option, consider implementing a quality CRM that allows you to automate many of your different daily tasks, such as email campaigns, social media engagement, website management, and document collection, just to name a few. Automation allows mortgage lenders to become more productive in many ways without taking away time and focus from their clients.
11. Increase potential touchpoints
Increasing routine touchpoints, or the connections you make with potential clients, can also help boost your closing rate. Purchasing a home and acquiring a mortgage is a major step and borrowers are often unlikely to jump into a mortgage without first knowing and trusting a loan officer. Increasing customer touchpoints, such as phone calls, emails, and face-to-face meetings, can help to build a relationship and, in the long run, improve loan closure times.
12. Boost your sales processing speeds
Unfortunately, one of the biggest contributing factors to unsuccessful closings is speed. Whether the buyer got cold feet during the waiting process, or the loan origination process was simply moving at a snail’s past, the closing falls through. While carrying out due diligence is still a priority, being able to offer a quick loan application with quicker origination, faster underwriting, quicker loan approval, and speedier closing times is essential to boosting your closing rate.
13. Commit to regular follow-ups
Failure to follow up is often a factor in increasing closing times or causing a closing to fail. If you have not received a response from a client in a timely manner, don’t be afraid to reach out and follow up. Life happens, they may be busy, and things like sending a document through may have slipped their mind. Never ignore the lack of response and let it sit. If a client isn’t answering a phone call, send an email that might be easier for them to respond to.
14. Be proactive and not reactive
Being proactive when it comes to loan closings gives you an advantage. It is much easier to anticipate and address potential problems than to address a problem after the fact. For example, it is often to gain a comprehensive understanding of a borrower’s financial situation and approval chance before having them fill out an application that will undoubtedly not receive approval. Instead, you can offer information on repairing credit or becoming better qualified, and then they can return when they are more likely to be able to close. Keep in mind that even if they aren’t closing, you want to keep in contact so when they are ready, they choose you.
15. Focus on the borrowers and pre-qualification and approval
If you are working with a potential homebuyer that is just starting to look for a home, it may be beneficial to suggest a pre-approval mortgage to make the process easier. While a pre-qualification may be enough, the additional qualification process can make the home-buying process easier by giving the borrower a clear idea of their home amount and speeding up the closing process.
Loan closing for success
When it comes to a successful closing, it all boils down to your clients. Making them the top priority of your mortgage business and following these tips can help ensure that you are meeting your borrower’s needs, doing all you can to make the sales process easier, and boosting your closing rates.
More closings start with quality leads
At Good Vibe Squad, we understand that in order to boost your closing rates, you need a steady stream of new leads each and every month. As we mentioned above, traditional marketing for those leads can take away your focus from building relationships and closings, so we are here to help. Our Unfair Advantage™ program helps show you how to effectively boost your lead generation and, in turn, increase your closing rates. To learn more, book a strategy call today.
