Great expectations
By
|
22/09/2011 8:00:00 PM
|
0
comments
Our mortgage process is quite broken up and we do this to play into each other’s strengths. We have an administration department, an underwriting department, a mortgage closing department, a CRM department and then our compliance department. I currently handle a large portion of our underwriting and take care of all our external marketing as well as relationship management with our referral partners. To be honest, with the amount of salaries I pay to run a setup like this, I’m not in the least bit content with closing just over 500 deals last year. Without adding anyone to the staff I have now, I believe we are capable of writing 800 deals a year. If I add more staff, then those expectations will rise.
After my first year in this business in 2004, I attended the annual Mortgage Intelligence conference and had the pleasure of sitting in on a learning session regarding office processes and systems. Don Stoddart was the speaker and he went through his team’s processes and systems and I was just in awe. At the time I was 24 years old, on my own, working out of a home office, with no staff. But sitting in that learning session and seeing how Don had this incredible process and how it lead to such high volumes just opened my eyes to how important an efficient system really was in this business. A month later I took a leap of faith and hired my first administrator and began my quest to grow an efficient system.
In the beginning, our system involved large calendar boards all over the walls of our office with all of our closings on it as well as last names of clients written on cut pieces of Bristol board being manoeuvred through a “10 Phase” closing system on another wall in our office. But finally, years later, our process is now refined and we are happy with it, although we are always looking to improve it. Recently we added a mortgage systems software to our office and it has been really helpful and effective. When we first saw a demo of it, our initial thoughts were that this was essentially our office process and system, but on our computers. It’s almost like they had been to our office and seen our system and then basically wrote a computer program for it.
Process is just so important in this business and it can lead to very efficient results with salaried licensed mortgage agents and other staff. I have seen many lead brokers/agents get caught up in this game of hiring tons of sub-agents, which I agree can be profitable, but frequently in this system the lead broker/ agent’s valuable time gets monopolized by the sub-agents. This then takes away from the strength of the lead broker/agent which of course should be generating leads for his/her business and refining of your company’s processes and systems.
My single best determinant regarding sales success was listening to Peter Kinch many years back and concentrating on being a niche broker. I felt that Peter was correct in his assessment that real estate investors were a very under-rated and under-marketed block of potential clientele. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that your average client might need your services for their mortgage every two to five years whereas a real estate investor may need your services for five to 10 mortgages per year. How hard is it to close a deal for a client 10 different times in the year if you already have all his documents on file from previous deals?