How Loan Originators Can Take a Reality-Based Strategic Approach to the Next 12 Months
What is “whistling past the graveyard”? According to Wiktionary, it’s an idiomatic American expression, meaning: To attempt to stay cheerful in a dire situation; To proceed with a task, ignoring an upcoming hazard, hoping for a good outcome.
All of us who make our living in the mortgage industry want the housing market and the economy to recover. The fact that loan volume has shrunk from $3 trillion in 2005 to a projected $1 trillion this year is reason enough for that desire.
But it’s one thing to hope for the best while keeping our feet grounded in reality, and another thing to believe the worst is over when the facts say something quite different. Case in point:
According to the National Association of Realtors®, contract activity for pending home sales has risen for six straight months, which some point to a sure sign the housing market is in recovery.
Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says the housing market momentum has clearly turned for the better. “The recovery is broad-based across many parts of the country. Housing affordability has been at record highs this year with the added stimulus of a first-time buyer tax credit,” he said.
Mr. Yun’s job as the chief economist for the NAR is to present the rosiest possible scenario in order to encourage the public to buy and sell homes. If you look back at his analyses and predictions over the past 4 years, you would have to give him credit for taking his job very seriously.
Unfortunately, he has been consistently wrong, claiming at first that the housing bubble was just a short-term anomaly, and then retreating for the last couple of years to the position that the proverbial “Spring” was just around the corner. Now he’s saying the market has recovered, when in actuality, the picture is not nearly that pretty. If you look more closely at the numbers, the Pending Home Sales Index in the Northeast and the Midwest regions of the country actually declined in July. The numbers only improved in the South (up 3.1 percent, and in the West (up 12.1 percent). The big jump in pending sales in the West basically carried the country’s numbers. And what’s going on in the West? The last time I saw numbers for California, for example, the vast majority -- more than 80% -- of all residential real estate sales were foreclosure auctions, REO sales, and short sales.
A nationwide survey of 1,500 real-estate agents, conducted in June and sponsored by the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance found that only 36% of all sales involve "non-distressed" properties ... Read the full article here
Change or Die: Do You Feel Lucky?
7 Critical Skills for the 21st Century Mortgage Professional
Suppose your doctor told you that if you didn’t change your lifestyle, you would die in six months. What would you do?Most people think they would make the necessary changes, but they would be wrong. The medical profession has done the studies, multiple times, and what they’ve found is that people in this situation will try to change their habits but, within 2 years, 90% of them slip back into their old ways.
If this is true of people facing the prospect of death, what does it say about your chances of making substantive changes if the only thing at risk is your income level?
What if you know that the way you approach marketing yourself and managing your loan origination business is taking you in the wrong direction?
In other words, if you know that you’ve got to make changes in your work habits, or risk declining income, how do you get yourself to change those habits when 9 out of 10 people who are faced with the much more serious threat of dying can’t make changes to save their own lives?
The odds are 9 to 1 against you. As Dirty Harry might say, “Do you feel that lucky?”
There is a way to motivate yourself to change old, unproductive work habits and behaviors. But it has nothing to do with luck or “will power”.
Where Are the Opportunities for Originators Now?
Ronald Reagan used to love to tell the story about a father who had two young sons: one was constantly worried and saw the danger or downside in everything; his other son was a perpetual sunny optimist. At Christmas time, the father decided to try an experiment. He gave his first son a beautiful and expensive Cartier watch. For his second son, he gift-wrapped a box with a pile of horse manure inside.On Christmas Morning, the boys opened their presents. The first son looked at his beautiful new watch and immediately worried that if he wore it, it would either get broken or someone would steal it.
The second son opened his box of horse poop, became delirious with excitement, and started running around the yard, looking behind bushes and trees. “Son, what are you doing?’ asked the father. And the boy (who could barely contain his joy) said, “Dad! This is fantastic!!! There’s got to be a pony around here somewhere!!!”
Let’s Have a Look at the “Horse-Poop” of Current Economic News. There’s Got to Be a Pony Around Here Somewhere. Read the full article here.
Build Your Success 1 Hour at a Time
How to Turn Realtors into Business Partners
How would you like to be able to sit down with real estate agents, and make a powerfully persuasive presentation that ends with their enthusiastic commitment to working with you, as equal partners, so that you each get a bigger piece of your local purchase market's pie?
How to Get Appointments with Realtors
About 80% of homebuyers are introduced to their mortgage lender by their real estate agent. If you're going to originate purchase money business in your market, it's vital to your success that you earn the respect and cooperation of Realtors. This article, the first in a series of three, will help you understand the Realtor's mindset, and how best to approach them. Included are tested and proven scripts for getting appointments with agents.How to Plan for Success
Do you know where you’re going with your mortgage origination business? Are you working a plan that you’re confident will take you where you want to go? Or do you find yourself making it up as you go along, spending most of your time reacting to outside stimuli like phone calls and emails? Do you have a system for managing all the details of your business, from lead generation to sales to pipeline management? Are you able to access your own creativity and follow through on good ideas? Or do you find yourself overwhelmed by the trivial details of everything on your plate?
In this comprehensive series of articles, you’ll find practical advice for setting up a system for managing absolutely everything in your busy life. The key? Recognizing that no matter how efficient you get, you will never have enough time to do everything. So it’s imperative that you have one central system where you can collect everything you need or want to do and choose the highest priorities with the biggest payoffs. If you could know with certainty that on any given day, at any given moment, you are doing the things that matter the most, you would not only be more accomplished and successful, you could live your life with the peace of mind that comes from knowing you’re taking care of first things first.
Double Your Originations
The "rules" of succeeding as a mortgage loan originator are really pretty simple:
- The more leads you generate, and the better you get at closing the sale, the more loan applications you’ll take ...
- The more apps you take, the more loans you close ...
- And the more loans you close, well, you know what that means to you.
What if I could show you how to generate more leads and convert a higher percentage of them so you could double your originations over the next 12 weeks? What if you could have the entire system -- including 12 training videos and over 500 pages of instruction and ready-to-use sales and marketing materials – for only $295? And what if I also guaranteed it – try it for 90 days, and if you’re not completely satisfied, I’ll refund your money --
For complete details, go here
In Search of the Silver Bullet
It has been said that “desperate times call for desperate measures.” That would explain a lot of the extreme anxiety I see in loan originators who are frantically looking for the Holy Grail of Mortgage Lending: The Easy Way to Close More Loans.The honest truth is that there is no such thing as a silver bullet or magic pill or “easy way” to close more loans. But this article will tell you what I’ve learned in 20 years of coaching about what it really takes to be a successful loan originator in any market, regardless of conditions or outside circumstances
Read the whole article here
How Do You Handle Adversity?
The way you respond to problems, challenges, setbacks and general bad news says more about you than you probably realize. It’s also a pretty good predictor of where you’ll be a year from now.I don’t have to tell you that the last couple of years have been challenging for anyone who originates mortgage loans. What I can tell you is that there are some very specific things you can do to improve your resourcefulness when facing any challenge. You’ll learn about some fascinating research on brain science that can really help you become more creative and proactive in your daily life and work.
How to Manage & Delegate More Effectively
Ever wonder why people don't always do what you want them to do? Whether you’re working with someone who reports directly to you, or with a vendor like an appraiser, or some other third party to a transaction like a Realtor or an underwriter, you’ve got to understand that everyone is motivated by their own reasons. So if you want cooperation, you’ve got to communicate clearly what you want (and when you want it), and then negotiate an agreement with the other person. This article shows you how to do that.
The Don't Give Up Form
Every loan officer encounters people who want to buy a home, but cannot currently qualify. How you handle this kind of situation says a lot about both your character and your business sense. There are ways you can be helpful to people who want help, without getting sidetracked from doing the things you get paid to do.
US Zillow Home Value Index
US Zillow Home Value Index
