Remember Your Marketing Department?

A New Reality Leaves No Room For Error

As the market enters and evolves through this transition, prioritizing new borrowers must not replace efforts to retain existing clients—and attracting even more. If they haven’t automated their marketing, lenders’ pipelines will empty. As originators turn their focus to newly qualifying homebuyers, those who keep their marketing consistently stronger will win business longer.

Changes in borrowing costs are not the only shift we see in mortgage lending today. The massive shift in employment has changed the way our companies look — fewer people in the marketing department and more competition among remaining loan officers are two results.

An even more serious shift has impacted our business referral partners in real estate sales. 

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) settlement has rattled the real estate community. Not yet certain as to the settlement’s long-term fallout, every working agent has been preoccupied with assessing these changes and will not respond well to extra requests for help from loan officers.

Mortgage rates are expected to ease further in 2025, but the best lenders and originators know that mortgage longevity is about more than making sales. Mortgage transactions are deeply personal for most borrowers. Whether purchasing their first home, refinancing to improve their financial situation, or investing in property, borrowers need an LO who not only facilitates an efficient, successful process, but also provides guidance and reassurances.

Winning the borrower is about establishing trust, which demands availability and reliability from loan officers — the correct answers to the wrong questions when those are inevitably asked. At the same time, real estate agents need partners who can consistently close deals with financing solutions that meet the needs and desires of their buyers. 

Unfortunately, agents do not have ample extra time for developing and nurturing relationships with loan officers. Agents are ensuring they are listing properties and signing buyer’s agreements with consumers. So, what does it require for an LO to stand out to them?

Best Results Stem From Best Practices

Anyone marketing mortgages is likely to seek a boost in interest as borrowing costs ease. Capturing the business (and the referral to boot!) will only occur if everything goes smoothly from pre-application to closing. To agents, loan officers who excel throughout the mortgage process promise to bring the greatest experience to the homebuyer.

Similarly, the most effective agents drum up extra leads and referrals to share with partners. Heavy homebuyer demand currently sits on the sidelines, waiting for affordability to align with their budgets. A proactive and efficient approach to marketing and lead generation enables LOs — and agents — to capture their share of the demand that’s likely to enter the market.

Time is your most valuable resource, especially when interest rates start to fall and the market heats up. The same will be true for your business referral partners. Streamlining your workflow allows you to focus more time on building new relationships while maintaining current ones. 

This means having a clear, repeatable process for every stage of your client interactions, from lead generation to closing. When your process is smooth and efficient, you can respond quickly to inquiries, meet client needs, and stay ahead of the competition.

Many lenders cut their marketing budgets during the past two years to help trim costs amidst lower revenues. As they look to re-invest in these departments, managers should think of their marketing processes the same way they think about loan processing — the best results stem from best practices and monitoring LOs to make sure they comply with the approved process.

There may be multiple pipelines that new prospects travel down, but every step in each pipeline should be mapped. A lender’s most-effective LO can be their most-effective example, allowing managers to create systems that help every LO perform at the level of top producers. Basic management tactics involve measuring what matters. 

When it comes to winning more business in this transition to lower rates, everything that LOs do to prospect, nurture, and close loans with new borrowers matters, from measuring how many prospects an LO adds to the marketing platform to how often prospects are touched, to how long it takes the LO to respond to requests for information, to how often the LO posts to social media. Effective, automated marketing technology makes these measurements easy.

A Culture Of — And For — Top Originators

Driving more business to originators stems from stronger marketing. Loan applications don’t happen by accident. In fact, marketing and relationship building begins long before a loan application is received. Nurturing these relationships turns LOs into a trusted partner who clients can feel comfortable returning to for future mortgage needs.

If you want people to call you for information, you have to be known in your market as the person who knows the answers. That reputation builds from consistent practice, by consistently adding value for partners and clients in your community. Speeches in front of civic groups, attendance at community meetings and events, authoring articles in the local paper, starting a podcast, or being active on social media can all make your LO’s voice the voice of authority.

While picking up the phone is still one of the most effective ways to convert leads into clients, the abundance of opportunities for getting in front of borrowers — and staying in front of borrowers — has never been greater. Whether following up on an inquiry or checking in with a potential client you haven’t heard from in a while, persistence and variety in marketing pays off.

The easiest and most effective way to differentiate your company and originators in home lending is through being immediately responsive to requests for information. When the phone rings, answer it. If you can’t answer when it rings, call them back. When you call them back, be prepared with answers to the questions they might ask.

When the business comes back, effective processes for staying visible to consumers and agents — and a culture of discipline that enables top LOs to do what they do best — will keep business in your pipeline long after competitors see their pipelines run dry.