Wednesday's episode of Mortgage Leadership Outlook featured Josh Friend, founder and CEO of InSellerate. He joined series' host Andrew Berman, head of engagement and outreach for National Mortgage Professional magazine, to discuss Friend's time as a mortgage originator, how he moved up the ranks to finally starting InSellerate and more.
Friend was a mortgage originator who later ran call centers and learned the best practices to train and motivate originators. He applied those practices and unique marketing with his team to create the Insellerate system.
He initially began working at Indy Mac Bank and became good at selling loans through a series of systems that he developed. He also applauded Indy Mac for being far ahead of technology. Friend added that he still hasn’t seen technology that compares to their risk base management pricing system with automated underwriting.
Highlights From The Interview:
- He started his own mortgage company with a partner just four years after getting into the industry. They did about $500 million in loans for the first year. He then began to teach some of his friends how to become just as successful and brought them on board as well.
- Friend told Berman that he had been building software the entire time while running his mortgage business. He would take rate sheets in Excel and build a system up and at that point was able to provide automated rate sheets.
- “One of the ways we became successful is we use systems and processes,” said Friend. “Build something repeatable, right, how do you make the average person as best as they possibly can be? Give them the tools, automation and best practices, you know, put them in the best place to succeed.”
- Friend said lead/contact management was one tool that he used to develop his technology. It was the most important metric because it provided information on what borrowers and loan officers needed and allowed InSellerate to tailor its offerings.
- Through the MBA Contact Study, Friend’s company tried to apply for loans from thousands of lenders and found that 56% of them do not respond to online inquiries.
- With InSellerate, the company takes in all of the call details from any phone system that a loan officer uses and integrates it with the CRM, which includes all call details.
- Friend says that the future of mortgage lending is virtual and has been accelerated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies have noticed how easy it is to use digital technology and realize that consumers aren’t going to want to revert back to the old way of doing things.
Check out the full interview between Friend and Berman below.
Previous guests include Joe Dahleen, Tim Nguyen, Kristy Fercho, Tony Thompson, Mat Ishbia, David Luna, Barry Habib, Rob Chrisman and more.
See all the interviews from the Mortgage Leadership Outlook series on its YouTube channel.
