Loan Officer

There’s an old saying where I come from…

… “Just get rid of the salt”.

For instance, let’s say you like cake, but the cake being served is loaded with salt, like it’s been soaking in the ocean.

If you just get rid of the salt, then the cake (or salad) would be awesome.

So in the loan officer / branch manager world, this is when you love what you are doing, but that 1 thing that you hate, you think comes with it.  How can you get rid of that part?

See, I’m convinced that is what holds 97% of the loan officers from achieving “greatness”, the greatness that they deserve and are worthy of.

They think that there’s part of being a top producer that is totally uncool that comes with the package, so they settle in mediocracy, robbing themselves and their family of what would otherwise be totally doable.  

For me it was working more than a 32 hour work week, and working evenings and weekends.

For others it would be investing in large sums of money that they currently don’t have or perhaps working on worthless internet “leads” or other “high work and low productivity” activities.

I was talking to somebody the other day that had been falsely lead to believe that she had to provide Realtors leads before she could ever talk to them (not a scalable way to build a mortgage business) and in reality fed to her by somebody trying to make a buck – but had never actually closed a loan… (weird, I know).

Whatever the thing it is that may be holding you back, because you think “Well, that has to be a part of epic or even modest growth”, just know that there is no one thing that has to be done, or at least not done by “YOU”.
One of my favorite questions is, “How can you close more loans without <insert anything that’s “uncool” for you>?”

I’m here to tell you that after decades of helping loan officers in all 50 states, as well as currently having one of the most successful mortgage branches in the nation, I have never been stumped on that question.

Two things: 

1. There’s always a solution, and it’s almost always way easier than you may think.

2. The answer usually comes from asking somebody that’s already getting the results that you want (deserve) without doing that thing you also don’t want to do.

Both of which results from just asking the right question to the right people.

See there, there’s the easy solution right there (which follows “thing 1” mentioned above).

So that’s your homework for now:
“How can you <thing that you want>, without <thing that you don’t want>?”

When you are ready for help with that, let me know and I’ll totally hook you up right here… <no charge>.

… unless you like salty cake…

Your homie,

Carl White

There’s an old saying, don’t buy more cows until you milk the cows you already have (ok, admittedly I’m from the South, so maybe we are the only ones that say that).

But the idea is to get the most juice out of the orange before going to the next one.

What that means for us branch managers and loan officers is, get the most referrals and new loans coming in, from the loans that you already have in your pipeline.

For example, as a high producing loan officer, I took an application on about 1/3^rd of all the sellers that my buyers were buying a house from using a simple method I’ll share with you today, and then I closed about half of those.  

So for example, for about every 10 purchase loans that I closed each month, I would close about 1-2 of the sellers to the house they were moving into once they sold their home to the buyer that I was financing to move into their home.  

So if I was closing 50 purchase deals per month, I would close an extra 7 or so of the sellers PER MONTH of those properties to the “new” home they were buying.

And if you were making $3,000 per closing, imagine making an extra $21,000 in sales commissions from those extra closings Per MONTH.  

Oh, and I would app some of the extra “7” sellers too.

Kind of a “Snowball Of Coolness”.

OK, here’s how it works…

Once a contract comes in, call the seller to introduce yourself.  (many times their number is on the contract, and other times we would simply google them for a number).

On that call to them, it would sound something like this..

“Hey Mr. / Ms. Seller, my name is Carl White with ABC Mortgage.  I’m doing the financing for Jane Doe who is buying your home at 123 Main Street.”

“The purpose of my call is to introduce myself to you and let you know how this works.”

“First of all, although I can’t go into detail due to confidentiality and privacy rules, I can tell you that Jane Doe is well qualified and I expect a smooth and flawless on-time closing.”

“I see that Realtor Randy is your listing agent that helped market and sell your home. I haven’t had the opportunity to work with Realtor Randy before (if I hadn’t), but I have to tell you I’m looking to help him and you get to the closing on-time and it looks like he did a great job getting a contract on your house.”

<Here’s the hook…>

“By the way, where are you guys moving to?”

<If their answer is to an area you are licensed in, then do your call to action…>

“That sounds like a great area.  Oh, who did you get your pre-approval from?”

<notice you didn’t ask them “Are you pre-approved?”, because you know they will likely say “yes” even if they aren’t.  When you ask “Who did it?”, they can’t make up a name on the spot most of the time, so those that aren’t pre-approved, which is most, they simply tell you the truth, they aren’t pre-approved.

Then I tell them how much smoother the closing goes if the financing for both deals are through the same lender (which, of course, is the truth).

Now, if they tell you that they are pre-approved with XYZ Mortgage, ask them who referred them to that company.

If they say “my agent, Realtor Randy”, then let that one go.  You aren’t looking to start your journey of this deal and getting Realtor Randy to refer to you his / her next buyer lead by pissing them off by redirecting their referral.

After all, they may have referred to their best friend, brother, or next door neighbor who is a LO.

But almost always, they tell me they got pre-approved with XYZ Mortgage because they used them last time or they just found them on the web and they really have no relationship with them.

At this point, simply ask them to send you the loan estimate so that you can do a free review to make sure they are getting a “fair shake” and you do this as a courtesy for all the sellers in all your transactions.

“We find it works best for you this way…”

And now you can offer alternatives and a more “smooth and on-time, flawless closing”.

This always worked for me very well.

Put it into action and let me know how well it works for you.

When you have any questions or you need more info to get started with this strategy, or any other strategy, you can contact us here

and we’ll help you with getting more referred leads <no charge>

Talk soon!