How To Buy Mortgage Leads

How Do Mortgage Loan Originators Generate Leads

Mortgage Loan Originators and Mortgage Loan Officers (MLOs work in a competitive profession and can face challenges with generating a consistent stream of leads and new borrowers. Traditional mortgage marketing methods for creating new business, such as cold calls and direct mail, have their place. But you also need to embrace digital marketing to improve visibility and widen your network of contacts.

Whether you’re new to the industry or looking to expand your existing contact list, diversifying how your brand reaches the market helps build a steady flow of new business. This guide provides MLOs with six useful strategies to generate leads.

What You Need To Know About Buying Mortgage Leads

What’s in this article?

After reading through various loan officer forums online, there seems to be a pretty common problem facing all mortgage lendersthere are never enough mortgage leads.

Plenty of loan officers know about running Google Ads but arent sure how to properly set up their campaigns, which is why theyre considering buying mortgage leads from lead aggregators.

Buying mortgage leads isnt a bad idea, however, its expensive. And as soon as you stop paying for the leads, they stop coming in.

What if there was a better way to generate your own leads through your own mortgage conversion-optimized website?

In this article, well explain how to buy mortgage leads, which kinds of mortgage leads are available, and give you tips on how to build your own mortgage sales funnel online to generate your own exclusive mortgage leads.

Use Linkedin For Finding Leads

It may sound tricky because LinkedIn is a popular site for networking for professionals. But, if you see, professionals are the ones who would be looking forward to buying a home or investing in a property. In a way, we can say that a large chunk of your prospective customers can be found on LinkedIn.

Moreover, by looking at their profiles, occupation history, job title, etc. you can gauge if theyre worthy of lending or not. The following are the ways to use LinkedIn effectively for finding mortgage leads.

• Create polls it will help you understand the buyers outlook
• Build a LinkedIn community to network with professionals, understand their concerns, and propose solutions.

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What Are The Steps To Buying Leads

Buying mortgage leads is a popular option among mortgage loan officers, especially as more potential borrowers turn to the internet first for their home search.

When an interested buyer submits his or her information on a website such as Zillow, that buyer indicates that they may be interested in a mortgage or refinance.

Then, Zillow , will then turn around and sell that lead to mortgage loan officers.

You can see what the prospective borrower may see on the image below:

What happens once a loan officer receives their leads?

Loan officers will receive third-party leads through the various methods that the service provider offers like email, spreadsheet, or a portal.

Once the loan officer receives the lead, he can start follow-up campaigns to try and convert the lead into a loan. If all goes smoothly, those borrowers loans will be approved and the mortgages will close.

The practice of buying leads can be a sticky subject among loan officers. This is because third-party lead aggregators do not always offer exclusive access to the leads sold. So, if you buy leads for a particular zip code or demographic, you may not be the only one receiving those leads.

However, you dont need to get discouraged by this bad press. If you think buying leads may be a good option for growing your business, educate yourself about the steps to buying leads, and the best practices to pursue after you do.

What companies sell mortgage leads?

• Inbound Prospect

Building A Mortgage Lead Funnel

There are many routes you can take to generate leads for your mortgage company. A popular method is to buy lead lists. This is where you purchase a long list of names and phone numbers from a lead generation company and make your rounds cold calling.

Buying leads has drawbacks. For one, you dont have a pre-established relationship with these prospects. They have no idea who you are and have no reason to trust you. At best, youll need to hound leads at high frequency to gain traction. At worst, you risk getting hit with a spam report, potentially resulting in costly penalties. On top of all that, many CRM platforms, whether mortgage or otherwise, dont allow or strongly disincentivize the upload of purchased lead lists.

If you want to effectively reach todays home buyers, you need to create an online presence through smart digital marketing methods. Today, millennials make up the largest share of home buyers at 37 percent. According to Cultural Outreachs 2020 NextGen Homebuyer Report, one in five millennials looking to purchase a house doesnt understand any step of the process. An overwhelming amount of these buyers said they search online for information to guide them through home buying.

That leaves a huge opportunity for you to provide education, form trust, and become this huge home-buying cohorts lender of choice.

Heres how.

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Price And Consensus: Ladr

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

AGNC Investment: This internally-managed REIT invests primarily in Agency residential MBS. As of Sep 30, 2022, 68% of the companys $61.5-billion investment portfolio consisted of Agency MBS. In light of the Feds sooner-than-expected balance sheet reduction, the company aims to operate with a more defensive position with significant hedge protection and lower leverage.

Over the recent quarters, the company has made pronounced efforts to reposition its portfolio to offset risks related to interest rates and prepayment uncertainty. While wider spreads have affected the investment proposition of existing Agency securities, it enhances the go-forward return on any new portfolio, thereby boosting the future value of AGNCs business. The improving supply outlook of Agency MBS and lack of credit exposure in a recession scenario add to the attractiveness of this fixed-income alternative, thereby making a case for AGNCs performance in the upcoming period.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys 2022 earnings has been revised 11.5% upward to $2.90 over the past month. This indicates a year-over-year decline of around 4%. Moreover, AGNCs 2022 NII is pegged at $1.30 billion, indicating a year-over-year fall of 27.4%. AGNC currently carries a Zacks Rank of #2 at present.

How Can Print Marketing Help You Generate More Leads

While direct mail may feel passé, studies show its still an effective and cost-efficient method of mortgage marketing and mortgage lead generation.

Recipients of direct mail open about 90% of the pieces they receive, versus only 20-30% of emails received. They remember direct mail too. Only 44% of recipients remember the company that sent a digital ad, while 75% recall the brand that visited their mailbox.

And perhaps the most important statistic direct mail garners a 5-9% response rate, while emails get only a 1% response rate.

Numerous options exist for generating mortgage leads through print marketing. With the help of a mortgage CRM, you can segment your database to send targeted messages. For example, past clients will appreciate receiving information on refinance or HELOC opportunities from a trusted advisor, while prospective buyers might like a quick reminder of low downpayment options.

You might also segment your database into groups based on age. For example, clients 62 and older might appreciate information on reverse mortgages, as might clients in the sandwich generation, who may be looking after their parents affairs.

If you collect career information, you might send first responders, medical professionals or teachers information on special offers for their professions.

Referral partners might also be willing to share address lists for sending targeted information, such as recent sales, open houses, or special educational sessions.

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Monitor Your Current Clients Properties

Your current client base can also serve as a source for leads. Around 4% of homes are put up for sale each year.2 This means that a portion of your current clients may be selling their homes and looking for new mortgages.

Since you already have an established relationship with these clients, they make for even better leads. Returning mortgage clients are more cost-effective to obtain than new clients.3

So, how can you find out when your current clients are listing their homes and looking for new ones? Certified Credits In-The-Market Alerts can help. By monitoring your clients tri-bureau credit activity with this tool, you know when one of your clients may be shopping around for a new mortgage. Once you receive an alert, you can reach out to them and market yourself as the right mortgage lender for their next chapter.

Your Brand: Scaled Instantly

Surefire automatically takes the framework of your brand identity and applies it dynamically to our marketing library. That means you can seamlessly include Surefire content with your own in-house content and LO-generated content and project a cohesive and impressive brand story to the market.

Scale is the key. All aspects of the Surefire allow both centralized marketing control and LO/AE control of their messaging using a series of organizational and individual permissions. Surefire also allows different rules for your Distributed Retail, Consumer Direct, and Wholesale divisions in the same system. It has never been easier to manage your image while empowering your staff to develop critical relationships with borrowers than with Surefire.

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Social Media Drives Conversations

In the United States, 80% of the population use social media. That statistic serves true in other nations as well.

Apparently, social media has become a huge part in every persons life. Whether it is a life update or knowing about the news, social media has become the go-to platform.

For a mortgage lender, that tells you one thing, marketing in the platform is a huge opportunity that can bring you far in generating mortgage leads.

Other than the huge audience in different platforms, what makes social media great?

1. Self-driving conversations

You dont necessarily have to keep a conversation going, your audience can do that for you. Provided that you have enough people engaging in it.

The reason why conversations are so easy to fuel in social media is because of how it is designed. Once you get something started and it catches on, it results in a series of domino effects due to one simple button, the share button.

2. Everything points back to you

No matter how far your post has reached. Every reader and viewer will always be pointed back to your page and account. This is what makes your entire business easily visible to a wide array of audience. So, the essence of getting your service seen is not lost, but further emphasized.

3. Get creative without limitations

Find Out About The Return Policy

When processing large amounts of users lead information data in Excel spreadsheets, there are bound to be clerical errors, outdated information, and inaccurate data from time to time.

Before spending a ton on mortgage leads, find out what the lead aggregators return policy is. The last thing you want is to spend money on poor data and not receive a refund on it.

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Use Social Media For Creating Brand Awareness

In this digital age, social media presence is critical for the success of any business, especially in the US. Approximately 80% of the American population is active on social media platforms. You can imagine an ocean of leads available online. Therefore, lenders must have a social media presence to find mortgage leads online. However, creating social media profiles on all available platforms will not be enough. Lenders must try to engage with people by providing answers to their queries.

Besides, social media is perfect for promoting services and receive consistent leads. If done correctly, you can generate leads at zero cost because these platforms are free to use. Some of the ways you can use social media to find online leads include the following.

Compete With The National Brands

Surefire has been designed from the ground up to let lenders of any size compete with the national brands. Watch as your brand is applied to exciting interactive content, your web site immediately offers lead converting calculators and forms, and your borrowers are delighted and engaged enough to remember to call you first. Earn that repeat business with Surefire.

Want to See First Hand What Surefire by Surefire CRM Can Do? Schedule A Live Demo!

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Lead Nurture Method #: Customer Relationship Management

You probably have a customer relationship management system. Dont use it for entering customer details and let it sit until it becomes necessary to pull up the customers file again.

Instead, be proactive with your CRM. Over time, as you build a list of clients and a stronger database, youll have a bunch of previous clients that may be ripe for another transaction.

Perhaps its been five years since they got their mortgage and their terms arent so favorable. Given the current market conditions, you know that they can get a better deal with a refinance. So, you decide to touch base, let them know whats going on in the market, and offer to help them refinance when theyre ready.

Not only have you provided tremendous value, building more trust, but youve also utilized a free way to create more business for your company. This is the benefit of using a CRM to its fullest capacity. Plus, CRMs have tons of other features like automated marketing, emails, social media scheduling, reminders, pipelines, and more, all of which can be helpful.

Qualify New Leads Affordably With Certified Credit

As you can see, there are many ways you can create a consistent flow of new leads and many strategies are totally free! Finding the right methods for your mortgage business will depend on your preferences, budget, and ambition.

As your business grows, youll need an affordable credit report provider to help you assess all these new applicants. Thats where Certified Credit can help. We offer affordable , as well as low-cost lead generation services.

Our comprehensive suite of credit-related services for mortgage lenders includes:

• Customer retention tools

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Content Marketing To Get More Traffic Through Google Searches

Most people find mortgage lenders through a Google search, after maybe consulting their friends and families for referrals.

To increase your odds of being discovered in Google searches, youll need to ramp up your content marketing production, usually referred to as blogging.

You should be blogging about each of your loan products, making sure to use whichever loan product in as many headings throughout your article as possible.

You should also create free, helpful guides, checklists, or even YouTube videos to prepare people for the mortgage process.

Because mortgages are extremely confusing to the average person, most people do research online before contacting a mortgage lender.

When your audience is searching for mortgage-related questions, whose website will they discover? Yours or your competitors?

Lead Nurture Method #: An Email List

Email lists are amazing for three reasons:

• Youre marketing to people who have agreed to hear from you.
• Youre marketing to people in a personal way.
• Youre marketing to people on demand.

Because of spam laws and regulations, anyone you add to an email list must give express permission for you to do so. Otherwise, they may report you for spam, and you could face heavy penalties. But as long as you have permission, sending emails to an expanding list of subscribers can be one of the most powerful ways to create new business.

You can send many different types of emails. Some of the more common ones are:

• Company newsletters

Be sure that whatever youre sending to your email list provides value. Also be sure to come from a place of helpfulness, not sales. Overselling in your emails will lead to a higher unsubscribe rate. Only trickle in special offers every so often.

To get started, simply use one of the many email systems on the market, build a list , and watch the leads flow seamlessly.

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Learning How To Get Mortgage Leads Is Not Simple

If you have come this far, then you already know that getting mortgage leads is no easy task. It requires a lot of steps, tips, and best practices, but with enough practice, you will eventually get used to it and constantly bring in leads.

The question however is, can you stick to the entire process that long? If you cant, it doesnt necessarily mean that you are bound to fail in your business. Instead, you just need a little help from the best digital marketing agency. Contact us today and receive a free strategy consultation that is right for your needs.

So How Do You Find The Best Mortgage Leads How Do You Get Early Access To Active Buyers What Mortgage Marketing Software Will Simplify This Process

We knew there had to a be an answer to that question. Thats how RatePlug was born.

After a long career in the mortgage business, we saw how hard other loan originators were working to build relationships with real estate agents. Even before the internet boom, loan originators were investing thousands of dollars into simple HTML websites, then spending thousands more on mortgage marketing: postcards, ads, networking, direct mail, and more.

But thats where things break down.

More than 99% of the visitors you are paying for just visit your site then disappear without calling or requesting a meeting. They just vanish into thin air.

RatePlug fixes this broken process. RatePlug is a mortgage marketing software platform that started as a way to aggregate rates and products across multiple data feeds and has now transformed into the best way for agents and lenders to work together using the MLS to build stronger co-marketing and selling relationships.

After all, relationships with real estate agents are the lifeblood of your mortgage business. If you arent building relationships with high volume real estate agents, youre just flushing money down the toilet. Agent co-marketing relationships make your NMLS login worth the investment.

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