By Adam Stein
CEO
LoanTek.com
Keeping Pace with Internet-Savvy Consumers
Leverage new sales tools and online marketing to get ahead
In an age of free information and countless online financial tools, today’s Internet-savvy homebuyers are less willing to provide their
contact information in exchange for
a mortgage quote. If this trend continues, the days of leads as we know
them could be numbered, and commoditized consumer records could become a thing of the past.
Consumers now can take advantage
of online sites that offer anonymous
comparative shopping — services
that allow them to compare mortgage
terms without providing identifying
information until they contact the
mortgage professional of their choice.
Consumers even may shy away from
commoditized lead-engine websites
and turn instead to consumer-powered
sites for their research.
Considering this newfound level
of consumer agency, how can mort-
gage brokers and originators en-
sure that their business keeps pace?
automated-quote applications and
targeted online marketing may be
the answer.
Auto-quoting
Workflow automation has emerged
as a requirement to compete with
consumer-powered sites. automated-quoting applications enable mortgage
originators to respond to Internet que-ries with intuitive and detailed quotes
of their own. Moreover, mortgage professionals that use consumer profiling to intuitively filter and auto-quote
selected consumers can dramatically
increase their return on investment
(rOI). These actions can help you
avoid providing the consumer with
unrealistic or other wise financially unsound quotes.
Effective mortgage automation
matches the consumers you desire to
your best terms. In these interactive
sites, the consumer often contacts an
originator after 15 minutes of compara-
tive shopping. Consumers who contact
originators directly often convert at a
higher closing ratio than those who
don’t. This can result in dramatic in-
creases in online marketing rOI. In ad-
dition, this direct contact reduces the
cost of telemarketing dramatically.
Budgeting and assessment
any savvy originator will want to use a
marketing plan that’s formalized, measurable and budgeted. Planning for
Internet-based origination requires that
businesses measure everything from
their managerial lead accounting to the
execution of deliverables by their sales
force. Some additional performance indicators might include:
• the cost of lead acquisition;
• the sales force’s contact efforts;
• conversion rates; and
continued on page 50 »
Adam Stein is CEO of Loan Tek.com and serves
on the board of directors for Cascade Pacific
Home Loans. a 20-year veteran of Internet
lending, his industry appointments include
president of the Washington association of
Mortgage Professionals, Conference of State
bank Supervisors’ Mortgage advisory Council,
and the Washington State Governor’s Task
force for Home Ownership Security. He spent
two terms as chairman of the Washington State
Mortgage broker Commission. Contact Stein at
(888) 562-6835 or astein@loantek.com.
By Randall Nachman
Operations manager
ATLOS LLC
Find Savings by Going Paperless
Electronic document management provides numerous benefits
Mortgage companies are in- creasingly making use of electronic document-management systems — and with due cause.
Improved efficiency can enhance loan-processing time and help reduce administrative costs.
but that’s just the beginning of the
benefits that going paperless can
provide. More specifically, mortgage
professionals should consider how
a paperless office can bolster their
company’s security, improve customer
service, permit more effortless compliance and deliver a multitude of financial savings.
search through filing cabinets and find
specific documents. How long will it
take an employee to walk to the records
room, uncover a specific document in a
filing cabinet, create a duplicate of that
file, deliver the copy to the intended
recipient and then re-file the original?
That time adds up each day, as do the
actual costs to your business.
by going paperless and using document-management software, your staff
can be more productive and more cost-effective in their use of time. This software also typically includes search functions that enable employees to find and
send loan documents immediately.
even be e-mailed to a client almost
instantaneously.
Going paperless also allows mort-
gage professionals to work with remote
partners and to access records online
without needing to e-mail or fax every
document. furthermore, most docu-
ment-management software can be
integrated with other systems, which
makes it easy to combine document-
management software with other pro-
grams you already use.
regardless of the exact functional-
ity it might eventually take, if you’re
looking for a document-management
system, then you must ensure it ad-
dresses your business’ needs and is
not too complicated for employees to
use. The goal, after all, is to remain as
productive as possible and to make the
continued on page 50 »
Cost benefits
There are several factors that influence
the overall cost of creating a paper loan
file. The most obvious cost is the production of the file itself. you typically
have costs for paper, folders, file fasteners, dividers and toner. With all of
these factors considered, if your company’s average loan file is 250 pages,
then your business may spend as much
as $13 to create a single file.
Now factor in the cost of storing paper loan files in your office. according
to a report from Cassidy Turley, the
average asking rent for office space in
the U.S. was $21.39 per square foot
this past third quarter. If you consider
the size and number of individual filing
cabinets your company owns and, for
that matter, if you consider how many
loan files your company stores, it’s
easy to estimate just how much money
your business is spending per foot to
simply store its paper materials. If your
company produces only 10 loan files
per month, the total cost of production
and storage adds up fast.
Mortgage professionals also should
consider the less obvious costs associated with producing and storing paper loan files. Consider, for instance,
the cost of your printers’ maintenance,
shredding services and any courier fees
that you may incur for shipping files. all
of these expenses can increase the
monthly costs associated with producing and storing a paper loan file.
further, you must take into consideration the time it takes employees to
Customer service
Easy digital access to loan documents also can make an enormous
difference in the quality of your business’ customer service. for instance,
when speaking on the phone with clients who have questions about their
loan files, digital documents allow
you to retrieve file information in seconds and immediately resolve concerns. In many cases, a document can
Randall Nachman is the operations manager
of a TLOS LLC. He has 10 years of experience in the mortgage-software industry.
a TLOS is a Web-based soft ware used for
mortgage-loan processing and document
management. It allows brokers to easily
create and share paperless loan files. a TLOS
technology allows users to easily manage
loan documents, statuses, tasks and much
more. Visit a TLOS at www.atlos.com, or call
(866) 793-3216.
