Sunday, January 01, 2006

Learning to get the most use out of your Internet mortgage leads can take some time, particularity if you have newer loan officers. Your loan officer is your first line of defense on lead quality. Your star Loan Officer’s opinion counts. Your best non-biased feedback will come from your top producers in your office. In many cases they are the most experienced and will give invaluable input on the lead quality. It was surprising for me to discover just how many brokers gave new Internet lead sources to their new loan officers, some who have never worked Internet leads before. We all are concerned with loan officer retention but in order for us to draw a fair conclusion on a new lead source we need to filter them through the loan officers in our office with the most experience in Internet leads. This brings me to the next subject.

Loan Officer History

How many of us at then end of the week or month know how many leads we gave our loan officers and more importantly what lead source it came from? Chances are if you are a large mortgage company your system generates these reports but if you are a smaller company you probably have to rely on verbal feedback. I have heard many situations of companies going through leads month after month without knowing anything about the lead, other than it was bad. Don’t rely on loan officers to give you all the feedback you are looking for. Tracking your lead quality and costs goes hand-in-hand with loan officer productivity on the lead source.

Let’s walk through the below example for June:


You spend a total of $10,875.00 on your leads. You just signed on Acme Lead Co. as a new lead source who sent you 95 leads for June. All your loan officers received leads from that source but one loan officer in particular received 75% of the leads from Acme. Would your company be able to identify that particular loan officer if you had this scenario? If you are able to identify the loan officer you can greatly decrease your lead costs and also identify your weaker loan officers. Let’s assume Terry received 75% of the leads from Acme. Now you are in a position to go to Terry and begin your discovery process. Also it allows you to look at Terry’s overall performance against his other lead sources to determine if, in fact it’s the lead source. Perhaps Terry is a newer loan officer. Reference Terry’s pervious months against June to determine any inconstancies.
Within your company you should be able to determine not only which loan officers are closing leads and from what source but also which loan officers are spending most of your lead budget. Determining your cost per funded loan per loan officer is just as important as determining your overall lead cost per loan officer. Now you are in a much better position to make an educated decision about the quality of a lead source

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would like to know if there is any reason to work with more than 3 lead companies at one time. I realize this would be competition for lowermypayment but would like some advise

Thanks
Adam

Greg Kazmierczak said...

Most certainly. For on reason, the ability for lead companies to deliver daily consistent volume of quality leads is becoming more and more of a challenge so you may need multiple sources. Each broker has a monthly funding number they need to meet and the corresponding number of applications that backs into. Be sure you are getting an average daily count based on your monthly projected lead flow, if you are not correct the situation now.