If you’ve read my previous article on getting appointments with real estate agents, you know that there are two elements needed in a successful appointment-setting call:· Relevance – If you want to get Realtors to agree to meet with you, you have to make the meeting relevant to them by answering the question, “What’s in it for me?” If you can show them, for example, that meeting with you will result in more income for them, it’s much more likely they will agree to a meeting.
· Plausibility – Of course, the other part of the challenge is getting them to accept that you have enough credibility to back up your claim that meeting with you can result in higher income for them. You need to answer the question, “Why should I believe you can do what you say you’ll do?”
I addressed these points in detail in the previous article, How to Get Appointments with Realtors. (To read that article, go here.)
So I’ll work from the assumption that you know how to get appointments with agents. What is the outcome you want from those appointments?
· Do you want them to smile and be nice to you, and tell you they’ll definitely keep you in mind. or promise they will call you with their next deal?
· Or do you want them to agree to specific, concrete actions that each of you will take to move the relationship forward, and set a date and time for your next meeting to keep things moving?
Only the second outcome implies that an agreement has been reached that the two of you will work together in a partnership to improve each other’s businesses. The first outcome is only designed to make you feel better. It may lead somewhere eventually, but the odds aren’t that good. And if your presentations produce the first outcome, and not the second, then either your presentations aren’t very convincing, or you aren’t asking for what you want – in other words, you aren’t closing the sale.
The Typical LO Presentation to a Realtor®
Unless you’re new to the mortgage business, you have probably made presentations to Realtors in the past. What was the main message you tried to communicate? · Did you try to educate them about the loan programs you offer?
· Did you tell them how good you are at returning calls?
· Did you discuss your respective golf handicaps, or your mutual interest in the local minor league baseball team’s fortunes?
· Did you tell them about the time you got that really tough loan done for another Realtor, and did it in 3 days? (If so, congratulations, you’ve just volunteered to be the one they call for the next crappy loan nobody else wants to touch – and they’ll expect you to turn it around in 48 hours!)
If you understand loan products well enough to know which program(s) best suit a particular borrower, and if you return calls and stay in communication with the parties to a transaction, and if you’re capable of going the extra mile to get the occasional difficult deal approved, then you have met the minimum, basic requirements for being a professional mortgage loan officer.
But using your precious presentation time to make those points to an agent is like showing the admissions officer at Harvard Medical School your high school diploma.
The Realtor® you’re meeting with already has a lender who meets those requirements. Plus, they have actual experience with that loan officer getting their deals done. All you’re doing is making an unsubstantiated claim that you have the same skills. Can you blame that agent for thinking, “What else you got?”
Strategy for a More Effective Realtor® Presentation
Let’s identify some clear objectives you’d want to accomplish in an effective presentation, and see if we can develop a strategy for a presentation that would accomplish those objectives:
You want to do a presentation that:
· Gets the Realtor’s full attention
· Proves you understand their problems and can provide some solutions
· Earns their respect
· Lays out an approach to lead generation and follow-up that involves you and improves the percentage of leads that convert into closings and commission checks for both you and the Realtor®.
· Gets them to commit to trying your approach for 90 days
If you were to accomplish all of these objectives in your presentation, you would have far more to show for the time you spend with agents, wouldn’t you?
But in order to accomplish these objectives, you have to understand the context in which you find yourself when you meet with a Realtor®:
As I explained in the previous article, Realtors live in a sales culture (where production and the ability to close = respect)
The heart of the problem lies in the way LOs are perceived by real estate agents. Realtors tend to see loan officers as supplicants.
· You’re always asking them for a deal; you never bring them one
· You’re a Vendor; which means they think you work for them
· They have little or no respect for you as a sales professional; they see you as an order-taker.
All the things you don’t like about the way Realtors treat you, stem from this perception. Change the perception, and you change the reality.
In order to change the perception of Realtors (and perhaps your own as well), we’ll need to debunk three pervasive myths. You don’t have to attack these myths head-on in your Realtor presentation. You do need to deflate them in your own mind, so that your recognition of the fact that these are myths informs your thinking and your attitude when dealing with real estate agents.
Myth #1: Realtors are “Better Salespeople” than LOs. It’s easy to understand why Realtors (and even some loan officers) might buy into this myth. From the Realtor’s point of view, the real selling takes place when an agent persuades a prospect to buy a house. The mortgage loan is something the buyers need in order to finance the purchase, but the real accomplishment is in convincing them to make the purchase in the first place. When the buyers meet with the loan officer, they’ve already made the really tough decision (with the help of the agent). Deciding which loan they want is like deciding what color they want after they decide they want to buy a specific make and model of car. Hence the perception that loan officers are “order-takers”, or “vendors” who “work for” the Realtor®.Let’s be honest: if all you do is help people decide which loan they want after they’ve already made the decision to buy a home, then the Realtors have a point. But it doesn’t always work that way! For about 10 years, I have been teaching my loan originator clients how to do a Strategy Session® with prospective homebuyers – many of whom have not yet decided that they are going to buy a home. In the Strategy Session®, these loan officers position themselves as the consumer’s “Homebuyer Coach” – someone whose mission is to help them make an informed choice about homeownership, and if they decide to proceed, are coached on how to find the right home for the lowest possible price – in addition to obtaining the best possible financing for their situation.
In these cases, the loan officer/homebuyer coach actually has more influence on the decision to buy a home than the real estate agent does.
Obviously, no profession has a monopoly on great salespeople.
When you think about what separates average salespeople from the best, one measure is the ability to “get the appointment”.
According to the National Association of Realtors, agents fielding incoming calls from prospective homebuyers (usually looking for information about an advertised listing) enjoy about a 5% success rate in getting appointments with these callers.
My loan originator clients track and report to me very week the number of leads they generate, how many of those leads they are able to contact and speak to, the number of Strategy Session®/Loan Application appointments they complete as well as other critical results. I compile these results so we can work together to alleviate bottlenecks and improve performance. Taken as a group, in 2008, my clients averaged a 22.6% success rate in selling leads and prospects on the benefits of a Strategy Session® and loan application (to get preapproved for financing) – and that 22.6% success rate includes outbound calls to leads responding to our consumer-direct marketing, in addition to incoming calls.
So who does a better job of selling – real estate agents who get the appointment 5% of the time on incoming calls, or loan officers who get the appointment (and the loan application) 22.6% of the time on all contacts?
Myth #2: Realtors Help Buyers Get the Best Deal on a Home. Oh, my. Where to start on this one?
Realtors – especially Buyer’s Agents – do have certain legal and ethical responsibilities to buyers. The vast majority of real estate agents take these responsibilities seriously. They will, for example, disclose any information they may know about the condition of the property, the seller’s reason for selling (if known), etc. They will, if asked, research recent comparable sales in the vicinity of a subject property. If asked by a Buyer to present an offer on a home, they will make a good-faith effort to present that offer in its best possible light. They will endeavor to see that the Buyer’s interests are protected in the aftermath of an offer being accepted, all the way to the settlement. But there is nothing in any of the buyer’s agency agreements in use today that requires the agent to negotiate the lowest possible price for their buyers.
Most Realtors would tell you in all sincerity that they do help their buyers get the best deal on a home. They believe it, and moreover, many buyers and maybe the majority of the general public believe it.
On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that the Buyer’s Agent works for the Buyer, because both Realtors are paid a commission – by the Seller -- on the sale of a home. The National Association of Realtors commissions a survey of homebuyers every year. Here’s one of the key findings of a recent survey: “Of greater concern to the homebuyers surveyed was the lack of incentive for a [Realtor] to negotiate the best possible sales price. The buyer cares most about getting the lowest price, while the perception is that the salesperson is motivated to complete the transaction and be paid a commission based on the final price.”
It’s not that the Buyer’s agent would deliberately try to jack up the price the buyer pays in order to earn more commission. The buyer’s agent’s share of the real estate commission is usually 3% of the sales price. Getting a buyer to pay $10,000 more for a house would only be worth about $300 to the buyer’s agent, and most agents are honest and genuinely like their buyer clients. They just wouldn’t do that. So what’s the problem?
Part of the problem is that the agents spend somewhere between 20 and 40 hours with a buyer before they close on a transaction and get paid. By the time the buyers get ready to make an offer, their agent has already invested quite a bit of their time with them. Most agents will try to determine whether the buyers like a particular property, and if they do, agents will encourage them to make an offer. Because they see themselves as “representatives” of the buyers, they will usually expect to be consulted as to an appropriate offer price. Because most buyers also believe the myth, they may very well ask the agent how much they should offer.
And this is where it gets a little sticky. The agent wants the buyers to buy a house (otherwise there’s no commission and they don’t expect to do all this work for free, nor should anyone else expect them to). The buyers appear to want to buy this house, and the Realtor® genuinely wants them to have this house, so the question as to what they should offer tends to get interpreted as, “What should we offer to be sure we get this house?”
Even if the buyers specifically ask what the lowest price they should offer might be, the agent is likely to be conservative in giving the answer, because both the agent’s natural self-interest in wanting to get paid and their sincere desire to help these nice people own this home – both motivations are going to be pulling the agent in the direction of suggesting an offer price that the agent is confident will either be accepted by the seller, or will be close enough to what the seller wants that it will at least produce a counteroffer. And that is almost never going to be the same thing as the lowest price the Seller would have accepted or would have been willing to negotiate from.
It’s not Realtors’ fault that they inherited a system in which they get paid by the seller. It’s not their fault that they have to spend so much time with buyers that by the time they’re finally ready to make an offer, the Realtor is really invested in that being an offer that leads to a closing. But none of that changes the fact that it is simply not true that Realtors help buyers get the best deal on a home. It’s not even true that it is their job to do so.
Do you need to rub that in a Realtor’s face? Absolutely not. But you’d damn well better know it yourself if you don’t want to be treated like the Realtor’s vendor in purchase transactions. This leads us to our third myth:
Myth #3: The LO’s Only Job is to Do the Loan; It Works Best if the Realtor Takes the Lead. This myth flows from the first two. If Realtors are considered better sales professionals, and if buyer’s agents are believed to be effective at getting the buyer the best deal on a home, you might also conclude that the real estate agents should be in overall control in managing the entire transaction. But given that the first two myths are, in fact, myths, you have to ask yourself whether having the Realtor® be “in charge” and having the loan officer take a back seat and concentrate solely on doing the loan – whether that really is best for all concerned:
· Is it best for the Homebuyer? Ultimately, the Homebuyer is the one in “control”. Buyers choose their Realtor® and their Lender. The only way the Realtor ends up in charge is if the Homebuyers give their power to the real estate agent. And that won’t happen if homebuyers are educated and informed about the dynamics of a real estate transaction, and they understand that it is their responsibility to see to it that they get the best value for their money when it comes to both the home and the loan.
· Is it best for the LO? Unless the loan officer enjoys taking a subservient position to the Realtor in the transaction, this is not going to be a satisfying arrangement. A professional loan originator will want to be treated with respect by the other parties to the transaction. You won’t want to have a real estate salesperson telling you how to do your job. And a professional LO will also want to help make sure that the Client’s overall financial well-being is served by the transaction. That means that your interest will extend beyond the financing to also include the question of whether the Clients have gotten good value for their money in the purchase of their new home.
· Is it even best for the Realtor? Much has been made of the perception that real estate agents feel the need to “control” all aspects of the transaction. It’s easy to understand why many Realtors feel this way – from their point of view, their commission is at stake. The last thing they want, after all the work they’ve done to put the deal together, is to have a loan officer screw it up and blow the deal. But obsessing about the details and status of the loan approval is time consuming for the Realtor® (and the LO). It’s also completely unnecessary if LOs don’t promise things they can’t be sure of delivering, and if the Realtor® trusts the LO, and if the LO is proactively communicating progress and status to both the agent and the buyers. When Realtors are able to trust their LO partners to handle their part of the job, those Realtors have more time to sell their next home and make more money.
Now that we’ve established a context for your approach to Realtors, I’d like to share some ideas on the content of your presentation.
Your Realtor® Presentation – Defining Their Problem
You want to begin by getting the Realtors’ attention, while simultaneously giving them a compelling reason to want to keep listening to what you have to say. One of the most effective ways of doing that is to begin by telling them about the serious challenges all Realtors face in today’s market. If you can get them to focus on the fact that they have a problem, they will be much more open to hearing about your solution. Nobody cares about solving a problem they don’t have.
What are some of the problems and obstacles confronting Realtors today?
· A Declining Market. While some markets are showing hopeful signs of recovery and are doing a little better than others, just about every real estate market in the country is a long way from the peaks of 2005-2006. Values have dropped significantly. The number of sales has dropped. Inventories have been inflated by foreclosure and REO sales, putting further downward pressure on home values and prices, and making it more difficult for individuals to sell their homes without taking large losses. And the Wall St. Journal reported (on 4/15/09) that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all say they have increased foreclosure activity in recent weeks and that they have lifted internal moratoriums which temporarily halted foreclosures. Foreclosure-related filings increased by nearly 6% in February from the month earlier, and were up almost 30% from February 2008, according to RealtyTrac. March 2009 forclosures were up 44% from the previous year. The backlog of seriously delinquent loans has been growing. All of this suggests that foreclosure and REO sales will continue to be a significant factor in the months to come. We already have more than a 9-month supply of single family homes on the market (which means that at the current rate of sales, it would take 9 months to burn off the inventory we have today, not factoring in any additions to inventory. And we have over 12 months of inventory in the condo market nationally.Do some research in your own market area to compare the number of homes being sold per month currently to the sales numbers from your market’s peak (probably in 2005 or 2006). If you have access to your local MLS, you can get this information for yourself; if not you can get a friendly Realtor or Appraiser to run the numbers for you.
Find out how many licensed agents there are in your area. Divide the number of sales by the number of agents to see how the “average” agent is doing today compared to a few years ago.
When you have completed your research, format the information into charts that graphically show what has happened in your local market.
· Homes Are Taking Longer To Sell. Compared to the peak of the housing bubble, homes in most parts of the country stay on the market a lot longer. Your area’s MLS will track the average number of days a house is on the market before it sells, and you should also convert this data to a chart comparing days on the market now to days on the market at the peak of the last seller’s market (probably 2005-2006).Be aware that these “days on market” statistics do not include homes that were listed and eventually removed from the market after having failed to sell at all. The stats only track how long homes were on the market before they sold.
Also, although it is against the rules, some listing agents will remove a listing from the MLS for a few days, lower the price, and then re-enter the listing in the MLS as if it were a new listing.
Both of these statistical “tricks” have the effect of making the “Days on Market” numbers look much better than they actually are.
· As Underwriting Guidelines Tighten, It’s Harder to Get Buyers Approved. According to Inside Mortgage Finance, “Significantly tighter underwriting on conforming prime mortgages and the disappearance of refinance opportunity for non-traditional/non-prime mortgage borrowers as well as those with investor or jumbo loans has dramatically reduced the number of people who can take advantage of low rates. And despite record-low secondary market pricing, mortgage rates in the primary market have climbed in recent weeks as major lenders have been slow – if not reluctant – to beef up resources to handle the recent rise in applications.” Nationally, about 1 out of every 4 home sale agreements are being cancelled due to homebuyers’ credit problems, insufficient down payment or funds to close, the inability to sell their current home, or problems with the appraised value of the home under contract.Of course, all this makes the skill and experience of the loan officer much more important to the success of a transaction. But it is at least as important to point out that the net effect of this trend is a reduction in the available pool of buyers.
· Buyers Are Taking Longer to Make the Decision to Buy. There has always been a time lag (on average, of about 3-6 months) between a consumer’s recognition that they may want to buy a home, and the actual purchase of a home (regardless of whether they are first-time or move-up buyers). But the collapse of the housing bubble, the credit crisis, the recession, the significant drop in stock values, and the dramatic rise in unemployment in recent months, have all combined to make prospective homebuyers even more cautious and risk-averse than before. This new reality means that buyers may take as long as 9 months to a year to make a decision. For Realtors (and lenders), this means it will take longer and require more patience and perseverance to move people from the status of “lead” to that of “prospect” and “buyer”. The longer your buyers take to buy, the fewer you can close in a month or a quarter or a year.
This would be a good time to plant the seed in the agent’s mind that you intend to show them that you can expedite the process of getting buyers to the point where they’re ready to buy.
· The General Public Doesn’t Trust Agents. According to a nationwide Gallup Poll conducted last year, only 13% of the public believes that real estate agents have high honesty and integrity. That’s a pretty shocking statistic, especially if you’ve seen surveys (sponsored by the real estate industry) that show very high rates of buyer & seller satisfaction with the performance of their agents.But these two kinds of surveys are measuring two very different groups of people. The Gallup Poll is measuring the general public. The NAR-sponsored surveys are measuring people who have just bought (or sold) a home with the help of a Realtor®.
The Gallup poll is showing what the general public thinks of Realtors in general. The NAR surveys are measuring the opinions of people who have just finished spending a significant amount of time working with and getting to know a specific agent. It makes sense that, once you get to know someone, and you have chosen to continue to work with that person, that there’s been a personal connection and a level of trust established.
There’s another psychological factor at work here, too: in the aftermath of making a major financial decision, people have a very strong tendency to make that decision, and everything related to it, “right” in their own minds. It’s not very often that people make a major purchase, and to turn around a week later and say, “Boy, was I dumb to do that!”
And it’s also true that, after completing the process and successfully concluding a transaction, clients probably have good reason to feel satisfied with the efforts and the professionalism of their agent. (The same would probably be true of their feelings about their loan officer.)
The issue that’s relevant here is that, before consumers have made a definite decision to buy a home, and before they have selected a specific agent to work with, they belong to the group represented by the Gallup Poll – in other words, they have a fairly high level of skepticism and distrust of Realtors in general. This makes it much harder for a real estate agent to establish any kind of trust or confidence in an initial telephone contact, for example. The skepticism with which real estate agents are viewed by the general public is only overcome when the agent has the chance to earn trust one-on-one with a client over a period of time.
The problem is that buyers agents – before the current crisis began – were already averaging 20-40 hours spent per client that they take to the closing table. Agents simply don’t have the time to effectively follow up and build trust with prospective buyers who aren’t ready to buy just yet. They can’t establish trust unless they spend one-on-one time building that trust, but the more time they have to spend to get a buyer to a finished transaction, the fewer buyers they have time to work with. It’s a real Catch-22 for Realtors.
Your Realtor® Presentation – Offering a Solution to Their Problem
To review: From the Realtor’s perspective, we have a declining market, characterized by an oversupply of unsold inventory, dramatically reduced demand, and falling housing values. The pool of available buyers is further reduced by tighter lending guidelines and practices, and consumer fear about the wisdom of buying a home in this economic climate. And to top it all off, the attitude of the general public toward Realtors means that an agent has to overcome a prospect’s skepticism by building trust over time – but agents don’t have the time to do that and still sell enough houses.
The solution you offer looks something like this: the real estate purchase market is under great stress right now, but homes are still being sold every month (just refer to your local market stats). But fewer homes are being sold than was the case at the last peak in the market, and that means that if the pie keeps getting divided the same way it has been divided in the past, every Realtor® is going to end up with a smaller piece of a smaller pie. The solution will be to team up with you so that your Realtor(s) gets a bigger share of that smaller pie. How?The buyers that are out there begin their market research and education process by looking at houses. These days, they usually:
· Start on the internet, and
· Eventually work their way up to visit open houses and /or
· Drive through neighborhoods, write down phone numbers on listing signs and call agents for more information about specific properties that interest them.
Every one of these three actions on the part of prospective buyers is an opportunity to begin -- and build on -- a relationship that would eventually lead to trust, and a sale. But the vast majority of real estate agents – due to a lack of time, systems, and marketing expertise -- are not set up to do this kind of longer-term follow-up.Remember at the beginning of this article I exposed the myth that Realtors are better salespeople than LOs? I mentioned an NAR statistic to the effect that when agents get incoming calls from prospective buyers (usually to get information about a home for sale), they are only able to get an appointment about 5% of the time.
The reason for this rather poor result is a mind-set and approach that was an understandable strategy based on an earlier time. We know that Realtors spend a lot of time with a buyer from the beginning of the relationship until the closing – certainly much more time than a loan officer spends on the same transaction. In a seller’s market (where there are plenty of buyers), real estate agents feel they must weed out the tire-kickers and the nosy neighbors so that they are only spending time with what they consider to be “serious” buyers.
So they weed people out by asking a series of qualifying questions along these lines:
- What kind of home are you looking for?
- Are you working with an agent?
- How soon do you want to buy?
- How much do you want to spend?
If you’re a prospective buyer who hasn’t yet decided for sure that you’re going to buy a home now (much less that you’re going to buy from this agent), these questions will seem intrusive and off-putting. So you will avoid direct answers to these questions by saying something like, “I’m just looking.” And that will be the end of that conversation with that Realtor®.
So, if your goal is to identify and develop viable buyer leads, this is not a particularly effective strategy. But if your goal is to “weed people out”, it’s a great strategy. You’re going to weed all kinds of people out, including people who will buy a home – from another real estate agent – some time in the next 3 months to a year.In your presentation, you point out the gaping hole in this strategy (we’re not in a seller’s market and we don’t have a problem of too many buyers right now), and you present yourself as the solution to the Realtor’s problem by offering to work with these “not quite ready yet” buyers so that you can get them ready while you are simultaneously building the reputation of the real estate agent in the mind of the buyer. The agent may not have time to overcome the negative stereotypes about Realtors and develop leads into true buyers, but you do. And what’s more, you’re in a much better psychological position to do so, for several reasons:
· In the aftermath of the subprime fiasco and the credit crisis, mortgage professionals may not be getting much more love from the public than Realtors get these days, but one thing we have going for us is that we are perceived by consumers as being more neutral because we have the ability to say “no”. People know that if it were up to real estate salespeople, they would sell a house to anybody that could fog a mirror. But to get a mortgage, you have to qualify, and they know that lenders sometimes say no.
· Buyers don’t have to tell the Realtor anything about their finances if you they don’t want to, but if they want to get mortgage financing, they have to be prepared to show their lender everything. This tends to create a much more level playing field between the client and the loan officer, and it also helps create trust, because an ethical loan officer will keep your financial information confidential. (In fact, the Financial Privacy Act requires it; remember that the next time a Realtor® tries to pump you for information about your client’s finances.)
· Because you are perceived as being more neutral, you are in a much better position to offer objective information (pros and cons) about the questions buyers have to resolve before they are psychologically ready to buy a home. Who believes Realtors when they say, “Now is the best time to buy”? But a trusted financial advisor can present objective information that will make a nervous buyer feel much more comfortable and confident about entering this real estate market.
If you’re familiar with my work, you may know that I developed a professional sales presentation for prospective homebuyers called the Strategy Session. One of the main objectives of that presentation is to calmly and credibly address each of the concerns and obstacles buyers have – concerns and obstacles that will prevent them from acting (buying) unless and until those concerns have been resolved.While you are working with the prospect to get them both financially and psychologically ready to buy a home, you are also working to establish and fortify a reputation for your Realtor® Partner in the mind of your client. That way, when they are ready to buy, the referral to the agent is seamless and makes perfect sense to the client.
Think about it: If a real estate salesperson tells you they’re good, that’s an unsubstantiated claim. But if a third party (especially if that third party is a trusted advisor) tells you that this real estate agent is good, it means a lot more.
Conclude your presentation by suggesting that you and the agent work together for a 90-day trial period to do the following:
· Cooperate on lead generation
· Instead of “qualifying” prospects who call the agent for information on a listing, the agent will simply answer the caller's questions about the home and offer to show it to them, and if they prospect declines (as they will most of the time), the agent will offer them a free subscription to the MLS, where any listings that come on the market matching the person’s criteria, will be emailed to them daily at no cost or obligation, thus saving them hours of time doing internet searches on websites.
· You (the loan officer) will be presented as someone who will do a confidential consultation to establish the prospect’s comfortable price range, so that that information can be given to the agent so they can set up the automated MLS search, without the prospect having to share any personal financial information with the Realtor®.
· You (the loan officer) will also offer the client a personal Strategy Session designed to help them make a plan for finding out all they need to know about the market so they can make an informed decision, with confidence, about whether this is the right time for them to buy a home. You will work with prospects for as long as it takes to get them both financially and psychologically ready to buy a home so that the Realtor® can concentrate on working with buyers who are truly ready to buy.
· You and the agent will meet by phone weekly for 10-15 minutes to share information about prospects and transactions in progress, and to brainstorm additional ways to grow your respective businesses.
If you take this approach with agents, you will get their full attention, impress them as an equal (and not a vendor), and will soon be in a position where you can choose to work with agents who respect you, share your values and ethics, and will work hard to supply you with leads that you can develop into committed buyers so that both of you can close more transactions.
But Wait, There's More!
I have created a 39-slide PowerPoint presentation for Realtors, based on the principles I’ve laid out in this article. This presentation is included in my comprehensive online course, Double Your Originations. In addition to the fully scripted Realtor presentation (which you can personalize and use as your own), the course also teaches you how to position yourself as a Homebuyer’s Coach, and how to do a Strategy Session. It comes with a 260-page illustrated manual, plus 12 training videos covering everything from goal setting and results tracking to lead generation, how to become a Homebuyer’s Coach, working with Realtors, and time management for loan originators. Course materials include marketing pieces, drip campaigns, sales presentations, and more. For details on Double Your Originations, go here.