Did you ever wonder what happened to the days when a loan officer walked into the office and there were 10 Internet leads waiting for him/her to call? Well those days are gone. I have spoken to several brokers over the past 60 days who tell me of a re-occurring problem they are having with their younger loan officers; they have made a good chunk of change over the past 5 years and are now resting on their laurels. Depending on their compensation program that may be ok since they are only getting paid for funded deals. On the other hand it sends a bad message to the other loan officers who are coming in the office and hitting the phones. There are hidden jewels in old internet leads. One company I know in particular requires their loan officers to make 50 calls a day to old internet leads and closing them. Face it, you paid for them and we all know that consumer circumstances change from month to month. Loan officers should be using every available resource to drum up new business. This included hitting the phones. The industry has gotten lazy to a certain point and it will be the loan officers that change their mentality who will intimately survive.

Many people have asked me how much technology is involved in getting an in-house lead gen program started. The answer depends on how involved you want it to be. You can take advantage of the technologies currently available with some of the larger networks such as Commission Junction, clixGalore and affiliateprograms.com. The tracking is hosted by them so you need to simply apply the tracking code information they give you to your "success page". This will give you a foundation as you built out your own lead gen program. Start small and get your learning. Once you have tested offers and different banners and you know what is working you are ready to look at a long-term strategy that might involve hiring a developer or consultant to custom tailor your platform based on your business or your needs.

So we have relied on lead companies for several years and now we are finding some of them are not providing the volume we need. For the smaller brokers out there this poses a dilemma. We find ourselves short of lead inventory. We have little to no marketing experience and know next to nothing about internet lead generation. So what is next? There are some ways we can begin to educate ourselves without spending wasted monies. Google and Overture for the smaller broker can be costly depending on the keywords mix we manage. http://www.superpages.com./on the other hand is an easy way to start familiarizing yourself with internet marketing and generating mortgage leads. The same holds true for the yellow pages on line. They are geographically targeted and tend to be less expensive than the bidding on Google and Overture. Start contacting some of your local websites and inquire about banner ad pricing. You may be surprised how relatively inexpensive it is. Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are great starting points.

Over the next few weeks I will be adding several methods that will assist you in starting up your own small internal mortgage lead generation program.

As our industry is going through some significant changes and readjustments we need pay particular attention to our lead vendors or the number of vendors we are working with if we are to maintain a profitable platform.

Many of us are discovering our vendors are running out of inventory. As we call lead companies and ask for 25 or 50 per day; many will say sure not a problem but what we are hearing is that many can not deliver. The reason, most mortgage companies and brokers are looking for lower LTV's and higher loan amounts. Program criteria is being is becoming conservative and it is getting more and more challenging to provide the type of lead the industry is looking for and still be cost-effective at the end of the day. For the lead company this means much higher lead acquisition costs as incremental advertising dollars are spent trying to get the pool of leads to satisfy the new appetites of the lead buyers. Don’t be surprised if lead prices go up or lead companies try new advertising methods to capture the audience lead buyers are now searching for.