To this company’s credit, they’re growing.  But the purpose of this article is to ask:

At what cost?

There are a few different ways to look at this questionable practice:

1)  Game On

One could argue that it’s the responsibility of the employer to loyalize his loan officers by offering a competitive product.  Let’s assume we’re talking about a fair compensation package, access to competitive programs at good rates, streamlined operations and a positive working environment.  If the employer doesn’t have these items in place, they’re putting themselves at risk, and have nobody to blame but themselves.

2)  Dirty Pool

The other way to analyze the situation is to apply the “Golden Rule”.  How do you feel as an employer when your employees are constantly – and aggressively – being poached by a local competitor?  Here’s another way of looking at it:  what if some dude had the hots for your wife and called your house once/week asking her out – knowing full well she’s married?  Nothing illegal about that, right?  But it’s about as scummy as it gets.

As you can probably tell, I think the practice is tasteless and borderline unethical.  But make no mistake, it’s proving to be profitable for the lender I’m writing about today.  At least, profitable for now.  I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how this story ends.  But in the meantime, what’s your take?

Reminds me of the mortgage industry’s own misfortune now that HUD, albeit with good intentions but poor execution, has laid down the law to try to help protect consumers when they engage in the mortgage process. Seems to me that they have their own other worldly definition of protection or enlightenment and all they’ve really done is to encumber and confuse the process.

On the one hand, it only takes six pretty basic pieces of information to constitute an application which triggers the requirement of providing a GFE within 3 days. That GFE stipulates that an interest rate and closing costs be for the most part guaranteed. While at the same time, it’s impossible to know all of the hundreds of intimate details only discernible by comprehensive analysis and discovery (credit reports, appraisals, verifications, underwriting, title examinations, etc.) necessary to prudently come to the contractual conclusion that this form mandates.

To make it all the more difficult, over at Fannie and Freddie’s offices (aren’t these pretty much now a branch of the government?) they have these things referred to as Loan Level Price Adjustments. Add in a little HVCC - you know, that protection for the consumer which has stripped them of that nasty thing called “home equity” and you have the recipe for nothing but good intentions gone bad.

So has HUD become the Department of Unbridled Hypocrisy (DUH)? Or are they smarter than we think and secretly wringing their hands over punishing the industry when in reality, those that deserved it have already left the building?

Too bad that the folks making the rules aren’t the ones witnessing what’s taking place now in our industry from the inside. Gatherings of the best and brightest are taking place at events like the Mortgage Revolution and together, they’ll continue to push for real practical reform that will actually benefit the consumer rather than the aspirations of certain politicians.

Rate Quote Insight

In the meantime, it won’t change the rules, but for those of you that like to educate your consumers about the potential pitfalls associated with comparison shopping based on rate quote alone- especially when these are delivered via the Internet or without the benefit of thorough discovery, then here’s a little tool that will help make it easier. Just click on the image to open a PDF and you can then save it to your computer for printing or email distribution.

To twist a line from Alanis, HUD has handed us 10,000 spoons when all we needed was a knife. The ultimate irony would be if we use those spoons to cut through the bureaucracy and red tape to deliver to our customers what they really want and need - good honest service, intelligent & well suited advice and all delivered at a fair and appropriate price.

Why Stop With the Bath Water When You Can Throw Out the Baby At No Additional Charge?

Here’s the big news:  NAMB is getting ready to officially announce major reductions on annual dues:

Professional Member (ie:  mortgage broker/owner) – $120

Affiliate Member – $95

Associate/Loan Officer – $50

These are the prices that your local state affiliate will add on top of their annual dues.  So, for example, if the Georgia Association of Mortgage Brokers charges $150 for a “Professional” annual membership, you’d add the $120 above and it would cost only $270 to belong to both GAMB and NAMB.  By the way, Georgia originators, GA Senate Bill 57 is still out there and it needs to be addressed.  GAMB is leading that charge.

If the cost of membership used to be your stumbling block, NAMB’s effectively eliminated this for you.  We need to come together NOW – not for ourselves, but for the interests of consumers.  If you’d like to join, please shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll make sure you get the VIP treatment.

I’d like to thank Jim Pair and Roy Deloach for listening to the people and doing what needed to be done.  It’s a whole new ball game.

By now, I figured I’d have written 10 blog articles about the experience. But our Facebook Fan Page pretty much sums it all up.

Above all, what I think what we found at Mortgage Revolution was our voice. Now, when our industry comes under attack, we have an army at the ready. I thought I was finished blogging for the day… until I stumbled upon this video. Pure class. I think our Conan O’Brien is going to come from the Mortgage Revolution. Better yet, we’ll have hundreds of them around the country.

This industry is far from dead.

I have had more fascinating, heart-felt, wisdom-filled conversations with strangers in the last year than at any other time in my life. Social media certainly has brought us ALL closer together in an intimate and powerful way, which I believe can only make us each more tolerant, patient, understanding and less fearful. (Now for stepping down off my soap box)

I’d like to direct this blog communication to those in the Mortgage Industry who right this moment are worried that they might not be cut-out for this.

I’ve had a few dozen conversations of late where a Mortgage Professional has expressed that this year would be their, “last ditch effort to make it in this industry” or their, “final chance.” In my efforts to dig deeper to understand the psyche & facts supporting this desperate, final charge into 2010, I’ve uncovered the following recurring themes:

External themes:

1. They perceive they have absolutely zero professional referral partnerships.
2. They do not follow-up or further cultivate relationships.
3. They do not belong to any groups, clubs, associations, networking groups, etc.
4. They do not ask for business.

Internal themes:

1. They are constantly comparing themselves and their business to others.
2. Their thoughts are preoccupied with worry, loss and lack of…
3. They do not read, listen to or engage in forms of positive re-focusing.
4. They feel alone, that no one can help them, that they must do it all by themselves.

For those of you who identify with any combination of the before-mentioned, I want to tell you, YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED RIGHT THIS MOMENT TO SUCCEED IN THIS INDUSTRY!

Here’s what I know you have:

The ability to change-You’ve done it before. Just think back over the time you have served on this earth. There have been other times of uncertainty, fear, isolation,…loss. You do not suffer those times any longer. At some point you began to laugh again, to create again, to accept a new way of doing things and to even embrace it.

The power to create- Think about all you have brought into creation, the careers, the ideas, the documents, the systems, the possessions, the friends, the children and the innumerous times you’ve re-created YOU? Your drawing board is still here.

The courage to act-What was it like when you first decided to leap into the mortgage arena? Did your business cards, marketing items, customers, knowledge, etc., simply appear out of your intentions? Or were there a series of baby steps and sometimes, gargantuan steps that you took that got your business off the ground? You couldn’t  do things the same old way that you had done them in the past, right? You’ve taken action in the face of many unknowns and uncertainties and you CAN do it again. Now, is no different.

Your well of worth runs deep. All of that glorious creativity and courage to change and take action are still within you, I promise you. You are a being blessed with a miraculous power to live a life exactly how you imagine.

Instead of imagining this year as your, “last ditch effort” imagine it as your year on the road to your greatest victories.

The struggles you perceive today do not define who you are or what you are capable of accomplishing. At some point in 2010, you WILL look back and all that you feared most will simply be a small blip on the radar of life. It will not hold you captive any longer.

Your choices from this moment forward, from day to day, hour to hour are the only things that you have 100% say-so over. Do not assign “bad” “good” “worthy” “unworthy” to those choices, no one else will. Give your mind peace and your heart hope, no one else can give this to you.

Here’s to all of the battle-weary, scared & scarred…Victory is well on its way, just over the next hill, your comrades know you WILL make it.

Right now, I want to tell you about a company that is so freaking awesome, I just had to call them up at 6 am on a Saturday morning and keep the customer service guy on the phone for 45 minutes telling him what a fantastic company he works for.  Needless to say, he agreed with me.

This company is called Eventbrite.  (Full disclosure:  I only endorse companies I like.  I don’t receive any compensation in any manner whatsoever.  This review is from the heart.)  During the first 120 days of our MRev planning, it was complete and utter chaos.  We were all just volunteers.  None of us had ever put on a seminar before.  The first paralyzing snafu occurred when we decided to incorporate as a nonprofit with the name “Mortgage Revolution” (all MRev profits go to charity) in the State of New York.  There was so much red tape to go through, we didn’t end up receiving our incorporation documents for almost 6 months… which meant we couldn’t create a merchant account… which meant we couldn’t accept credit cards… which means we couldn’t pre-sell MRev tickets.

It’s kind of difficult to gauge how many people are going to attend your event when you can’t even sell them a ticket!  Eventbrite solved this for us with a few clicks of my mouse.  We created our event online – and Eventbrite handled all the ticket sales – even including the credit card function.  Once the event is over, they wait 5 business days and cut a check for the proceeds to you.  Now THAT’S easy.

One of the other really cool features of Eventbrite is their suite of communications tools.  Let’s say you want to send a quick email to every registered attendee of your event… you can do this within Eventbrite in about 2 minutes.  No managing a database.  No worrying about getting blocked by SPAM filters.  Just a clean, easy way of communicating critical details & news.

Bear with me here… there are a lot of other killer features I loved about Eventbrite.  Perhaps my favorite:  the ability to create “discount codes” on the fly.  If I was on the phone with someone who wanted to come to MRev and needed some sort of group discount, I could click a button and build a special discount code just for that person (or group of people).  You couldn’t imagine how handy this is until you start receiving the calls with one-off requests.

Okay, final thing… once you’ve created your event and determined how much you’re charging for tickets, Eventbrite creates a widget for you.  You simply copy the embed code (just as simple as embedding a photo in a blog article) and drop it wherever you want it.  Your promotional partners can do the same on their sites.  This Eventbrite tool’s functionality knows absolutely no boundaries.

So if you’ve ever thought of hosting an event – say a first time home buyer seminar – and want to save yourself a world of pain… just create a free Eventbrite account and get to work.  They make their money by attaching a nominal fee to each ticket sold (kind of like Ticketmaster!).

Being that I’ve been working with mortgage professionals and their business planning efforts for five years now, I can say, without blushing, I have some expert advice to share on this matter.

Sometimes you’ve got to creep-up on the business of business planning

What I mean is, if you tell yourself,

“Self, we’re going to spend all day today devising our business plan for 2010 and we’re gonna do it by ourselves, locked up in our office, with a blank Word doc or giant whiteboard as our business planning canvas.”

Likely what will happen is your “Self” will get cold feet, create reasons and emergencies and must-dos to keep you from what your subconscious sees as an enormous and brain-draining task.

To combat this, try a business planning warm-up exercise. Just stick one toe into the icy cold water to start. Here’s an exercise that I share with my own coaching clients who feel anxious about beginning the process: I CAN Plan Business ACTION Planning Primer

Buddy-up with other like-minded Mortgage Professionals

Going it alone truly does decrease the likelihood that one will finish his/her plan. Remember the old saying, “No one succeeds alone!”

Buddy up with 2 or 3 other goal-oriented, enthusiastic mortgage professionals in your area. Set a date and place, preferably NOT in your office or theirs and keep the agenda simple.

Here are 5 business foundations to consider as you begin to brainstorm your goals as a group:

1. Time Management
2. Marketing & Lead Generation
3. Database Management
4. Building Business Referral Partnerships
5. Tracking/Metrics

Be specific with your goals and simplistic with your process

Creating dynamic, detailed, action-driven goals is the MOST important aspect of your business plan. All of our excitement, hope and renewed energy comes from the act of creation and creativity. Don’t just stop with a goal like:

Develop methods to cultivate my new business referral relationships.

Take it to the next level with actionable items like:

1. Invite 5 of my new business referral partners to meet at my office on a quarterly basis as a Mastermind group.Rotate who will set the agenda and lead the group.
2. Locate and schedule to attend at least 3 business growth seminars, workshops, or presentations per year. Call all of my referral partners to let them know about the event, and for those who agree to go to the event, host a dinner party immediately after to discuss take-aways and each person’s implementation strategy.
3. Invite my new referral partners to join www.LinkedIn.com, and offer to write a recommendation for the ones who accept the invitation.

Always set target action dates for all of the activities you must engage  in, in order to accomplish your goals. Looking at the year ahead can feel daunting. Decide when you’ll start on certain goals by quarter, first. Then take it down to months within the quarter and then finally into the week of that month you have designated as your target action date. Whatever you do, DON’T SKIP THIS STEP. Prioritizing your goals and getting them into your calendar drives a significantly higher percentage of success than passively keeping your goals in a workbook.

There are dozens of seminars, software applications and workbooks with CDs & DVDS on the topic of business planning, all of which can cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars. Much of the content and instruction is complicated and quite frankly, overkill, for what is needed in order to develop an effective plan.

What you need:

1. Very specific, actionable goals WRITTEN DOWN.
2. All goals and specific action steps prioritized into your Outlook, ACT, Franklin Covey or other favorite calendar tool.
3. “Buddies” with whom you can share best practices and brainstorm goals.
4. An accountability partner that you meet with once or twice a month, without fail, for the entire year.

However you attack the business of business planning, just remember, it’s personal and will drive certain emotions and this is precisely WHY many professionals do not engage in the process even though they know they should.

It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, conflicted or overwhelmed when sitting down to write your goals and action plan. As the old saying goes, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” Your business, your family and most importantly, YOU are worth the effort.

First off, per Mark Madsen’s suggestion I have upped my social networking presence. I think I answered one post on Zillow and 2 weeks ago a client popped up that told me he had stopped looking for a home over 1.5 years ago. Turns out he started looking again, was approved by 2 other mortgage companies but saw my post on Zillow and sent me a contact from there. Long story short – we’re closing his loan next week!

Now, the flip side of that story is “Shame on me!!!”. Shame on me for not having an automated program to keep in touch with folks like this potential buyer. I’m lucky that he remembered me (I’d like to think it’s all of the value and education I provided but let’s face it- I’m lucky he found me).

That feeds into one of my other easy goals for the year: Getting some automated marketing out to my existing and past clients and more for my referral partners. I had to be honest – I was AWFUL at this. Again, I was lucky that my clients really feel strongly about me because I do get a lot of referrals from past clients but how many opportunities did I miss because I didn’t have an easy, automated program in place.

So yesterday I powered through and started with an easy exercise. I entered my database of closed loans from this year into Platinum Plus (I actually figured out how to do that on my own – it was pretty easy!).

On the very evening that the initial ‘Thank You’ and ‘here’s the info you should expect over the coming months’ email that went out I had 3 responses from clients with ‘Thank you’ emails of their own. That may not seem like a big deal to all of you but this is something that I’ve been trying to do for years and the elation of getting it done and seeing instant results was great. Maybe it’s just me.

Now, the reality is that 4 people on my list were already being emailed by other Platinum Plus members. While I was very excited to get the program started I was also more than a bit upset that some of my great clients and referral partners are already spoken for by someone else. I KNOW I missed a refi and boy am I ticked – I really did a lot to help this couple buy a home when their loan was declined elsewhere and they went with someone else for their refi. Grrr, well guess what? That was MY fault. You’re welcome to the LO that got that deal – I really rolled the red carpet out for you on that one by not keeping in better touch with them and you deserve it. Lesson learned.

Leave it to me to identify the pain in this situation when there are so many positive takeaways. That’s just my process. If I only look at the silver lining I know I won’t adapt and learn. The hard stuff is what motivates me so I tend to focus on that.

I’ve also started a letter campaign for every client. A 3 year program where I only need to set and forget it once. Mark Green’s TopOfMind.com is a great place to set something like this up. Holiday cards were a simple click and the 3 year card program is the same. Done.

Will any of this replace the calls, the personal approach, etc.? Definitely not. But I only have so many hours in the day and this really helps leverage some additional contact that is paying dividends already. And guess what? I barely know what the heck I’m doing with this stuff. That’s how easy it is!

It took about a day of work that I needed to carve out so I did a lot of this while on conference calls and I’ve already gotten the responses to show for that work – I love instant gratification

So if you are putting things like this off my suggest is – DON’T. It’s very little effort, money and time but should yield some great results.

Thanks again to the Marks and Mr. Egeberg for reminding us about our BHAGS (Big Hairy Audacious GoalS)!!!

Now go get some easy, effective work done – and start with the low hanging fruit!

If you’re in the purchase business game, it makes perfect sense to partner with agents that have high traffic sites which attract your target audience (Buyers).

My Las Vegas mortgage relationship-based business model had a slight set back in 2007 when the local market took a small turn for the worse.

Basically, all of my loyal agents ended up having to find new jobs, and the equity in my past clients’ properties disappeared.

While struggling to research new options, I realized that one of my close friends and Las Vegas agents was actually thriving as a result of his online presence.

Since we had already been working together on his sites for a couple of years, I decided to put all of my eggs in the online basket and go where the buyers were…. The Internet.

Over the course of several years, we chased shiny objects, built a real estate social network, launched some niche FHA and Property Management blogs and scraped our knees along the way.

However, the one thing we could always count on was that thousands of potential buyers were finding us in the search engines every month.

In our online evolution, we realized that the key to our success was getting found in the search engines at the precise moment our target audience was ready to make a buying decision.

In order to maintain those high traffic search rankings we have to invest several hours writing content and building links.

The Result -

Thousands of unique visitors a month searching for homes and reading about the mortgage or real estate process on our blogs.

How Does That Traffic Convert?

Well, it depends on how soon these buyers need to close on a property.  Our typical sales cycle is about 4-8 months from the time someone lands on a real estate blog and then closes on a property.

Either way, the agents are busy closing transactions every month that are 100% generated from web traffic.

Keep in mind, these buyers aren’t typical Internet leads that get duped into filling out an online web form which generates hundreds of solicitation calls.

Instead, the people contacting us as a result of finding us online and reading our blogs are more informed and feel a sense of trust.

In essence, by providing valuable educational content on your agent’s site, potential buyers build a relationship with you before they’ve even made that initial phone call.

Main Point:

If you’re in the purchase money game, then the most efficient use of your time online is to contribute some mortgage related content to a local high traffic real estate blog.

Benefit To Contributing Loan Officer:

Get in front of the agent and their clients on a regular basis.

Benefit To Real Estate Agent:

Targeted content, and a lot of it, will attract buyers online that are in their final stages of making a decision to move forward with a home purchase.

Content, Traffic and Links are the three things that a social media savvy agent care more about than anything else.

Benefit To Client:

Education and empowerment.  You may say that you’ve got great service and you’re a consumer advocate, but borrowers expect us to earn their trust and respect these days.

_______

I have the replay of a 60 minute webinar / interview about this strategy posted here:

Partnering With Social Media Savvy Agents Online

This isn’t a secret system with some hidden agenda we’re selling.  The reality is that very few originators will actually follow through with this.

The few that do will make powerful online networking partners.

As my friend Eric Blackwell says: Search Engine Marketing is a team sport.

Either way, it’s gonna take a strong army of mortgage professionals working together for a common goal if we want to bring some honor back to our industry in 2010.

Unfortunately, Mark Green wasn’t able to make the trip to Vegas and share the stage with us due to an injury he sustained trying to rescue a cat from a tree.

Sorry bro, you were missed.

Either way, since our presentation was split between partnering with real estate bloggers and using the best Twitter applications, the 90 minutes was obviously not nearly enough time to cover the basics and address all of the questions.

However, as promised, I’ve embedded the updated slides in this post and have scheduled a follow-up webinar for us to go into more detail.  We’ll also allow for plenty of time to answer all questions, as well as stir it up a little in the Top of Mind Live Chat.

Actually, we’ve split the NAMB West content up into three separate webinars over the next few weeks so that we can really give these topics some justice.

Webinar 1:  Tuesday, Jan 5 - Partnering With Social Media Savvy Agents Online

I’ve invited my Las Vegas real estate web partner to join me in this call so that he can help add some perspective and answer questions from an agent’s point of view.

Webinar 2:  Wednesday, Jan 6 – 7 Strategies For Stalking Agents Online

Whether you understand social media or not, I’ll show you the best web tools to use for the purpose of getting in front of your target audience, meeting the right agents that are actually making a living from their web presence and approaching the new relationship from a different angle that actually works.