Loan officer business plans are harder to make than ever before. Fundamentally, its about contacts, units, closings That’s what it’s all about, and making this happen for a loan officer is no easy task. There are great “free” resources online to get business, but it comes down to a couple of things: talking to and getting the trust of human beings. The last time I wrote a loan officer business plan I was still a loan officer. I wanted to cut my workload from 50 hours a week to 30. Now, it’s not that way anymore.
1. LO Business plan truth #1: You must have a massive amount of quality contacts: First, the mindset of 3-4 deals a month isn’t gonna happen. The velocity of deals isn’t there any more. You don’t get a deal opened in the beginning of the month that closes 15 days later. With the appraisal and underwriting all taking longer, you need more going on at all times in order to close enough. This means that if your goal is 2mm a month, then you need 6mm in your pipeline. From delays like the Short Sale process, to stupid stuff like not controlling an appraiser, the process is slower. Time is the enemy of all deals. To compensate for what’s happening, you have to have more contacts, more leads, and more of everything. Consider joining a multi author mortgage blog like Lenderama.
2.) Loan officer business plan #2: You must stay in front of people all the time with a relevant message Mortgage Loan officer Tyler Osby is really good at this. He uses an e-mail newsletter (a service we offer here at FlatRate) to always be in touch with his best contacts. He’s as regular as a clock, and he’s dispelling fears: by showing up daily, Realtors will know that he means business and that he’s got your back. He’s here to help, and hopefully here to stay.
3.) Loan officer business plan #3: must mind your numbers: More than a Real estate agent, your business needs volume. Get followers on Twitter using TweetSpinner (we’ll be happy to do this for you). Get followers on a blog using SribeSEO and other SEO oriented copy-writing technques. Create content that matters create loads of it and have boxes (like on oursite) that convert. We’lll show you the ropes if you get a blog. Do a lot of this. Content creation is the engine of interested people, that’s the engine of leads.
4.) Loan officer business plan #4 Be ubiquitous. Guest blog everywhere you can. Damn the tension. Be everywhere all at once. You need to be on loads of social networks casting a wide net. You need to then focus on adding depth. The more hooks in the sea the better. You need to find every forum to post on and be findable everywhere with your keywords. Your keywords are the important part of the search–we can show you how to do that. Track where you’ve posted.
5.) No LO business plan is complete without Realtor business. Have their back. Track how many you contact and have a certain amount of churn. Always contact 20-40 new realtors per month and find ‘em. To gather the realtors, try using Active Rain and mingling and answering good questions.
6.) If you are having trouble: Use BringTheBlog.com to be a good online conversation starter. You’ll have good content done by mortgage meistro and multi mullion dollar man Dan Green.
Overall: you need more leads than you think you have. You need to pitch bad leads as rapidly as possible. You need to make sure that you have at least 3x the monthly pipeline that you need, and work relentlessly.
No, this isn’t complete, but we have tools that can help–when you get a blog the best thing to do is to define your process. Nobody in the LO business is gonna knock you off, you can fix everything yourselves. Let me know if we can be of service.
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