nmp mortgage professional
“A successful loan originator is one who must have a strong knowledge of the industry, not someone who is just a paperpusher or someone who is consumed by making money.”
By Raymond Bartreau
APRIL 2012
WISCONSIN MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINE
NationalMortgageProfessional.com
24
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Once you have exhausted all of your past clients, contacts and referral partners with the new Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) product, what’s next? You will want to start thinking about other forms of generating new business in the marketplace with this program. There are more than 27 million Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan holders nationwide who have no idea about HARP 2.0. The goal here is to find your audience within this large group and get yourself in front of them, or better yet, get them to come to you. The best way to do this is direct marketing, which consists of a few different options and avenues: Radio, TV, cold calling, direct mail and the Internet. As we all know in the mortgage industry, lenders have guidelines on pretty much every loan product on the market. If you are going to use direct marketing in the mortgage industry, the first thing you want to do is find the amount of homeowners that fit within your lending capabilities, in this case, we are talking about HARP 2.0. Some recent count studies were ran with three of the industry’s leading database compiler/managers of mortgage and here is what we came up with: There are more than 27.5 million Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans in America right now. There are currently more than 11 million Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac homeowners that are upside down on their mortgage (more than 100 percent LTV). Two states have more than 1.8 million, four states have more than 475,000, and another 31 states have 45,000-plus homeowners who can be helped. Of those 11 million, nearly 60 percent of these homeowners are current right now on their mortgage. The other 40 percent-plus could get current and potentially be helped before the end of 2013 if they are educated soon and make the efforts for the next six to 12 months. Depending on your specific lender requirements for this program, you would take these massive databases, and filter them down based upon the criteria you are looking to lend to. FICO, LTV, loan amount, origination date, late(s), no bankruptcies, and many more filters are available when you are looking to create your perfect audience. After extreme HARP 2.0 overlay filtering, we end up with a total of 2.3 million marketable (outbound with addresses) homeowners who may qualify for HARP 2.0. Of those, more than 215,000 homeowners are available to be called after we do a Do-Not-Call (DNC) scrub on the database. Since most of these folks have not seen a mortgage offer over the last two to four years, you should see a pretty good response on any direct mail continued on page 29
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again. We look at B to B … all retail, hiring virtual LOs, branch expansion, etc. Right now, a lot of the account executives did their year-end and have captured back the business, but we are on the list to be the in-house mortgage company for large groups of organizations, whether they’re union or public companies, we’re expanding into all areas of origination. We are predominately expanding in the New York Metro area, but we are becoming licensed in some areas of the South as well. In addition, we are also beginning to align ourselves with companies working with real estate-owned (REO) properties. We are also increasing our presence in the social media space through a heavy involvement with LinkedIn, Facebook and Google … Meadowbrook Financial is expanding in all areas. If a branch comes to work with Meadowbrook Financial Mortgage Bankers, what type of support do you offer these branches? We are a business in a briefcase! Literally, there is a briefcase where they can originate from any computer, laptop and login 24 hours a day, seven days a week and pull credit reports, price a loan, run Desktop Underwriter, submit a file to underwriting, or ask for help with questions or concerns with a file guideline. Users can press a button and upload documents for review, they can download docs to a real estate agent, track the submission of their loans … we provide the ability to accurately track the entire process at the touch of a button. All of this information is available via the Internet. Everyone needs to be computer savvy. We do have some people who are just frightened by IT. In fact, I have one person who calls me
every time a rate drops and wants me to price the loan. I have to pull over in my car to tell her the current rates. We also have programs that allow LOs to remain LOs and not have to be so IT-savvy. We accommodate all types of LOs. Do you feel that there a particular business that works best in this environment … what kind of branches work best for Meadowbrook Financial? We don’t cater to a call center that does lead generation or not cater to a call center that just does referrals … we treat them all the same. We have the technology in place for a consumer to log into our system and check the status of a loan. We don’t treat the branch any different than the consumer … they are all treated the same. We don’t cater to any sources of a loan … we ultimately cater to the client. LOs in sales fuel our fire, as a good LO who has a bad experience with us is like losing a client. Happy LOs bring in more clients. Where do you see yourself and the direction of Meadowbrook Financial over the course of the next five years? Currently, we are looking to expand right away, with corporate branches up and down the East Coast. Right now, we have a total of four call centers. In three years, we plan on having 35 corporate branches, and by five years from now, have 50 corporate branches under the Meadowbrook Financial Mortgage Bankers banner. We are expanding rapidly and are looking for the right people with a proven work history and prior success. We treat all of our corporate branches the same, offering them the same tools, we help them recruit, we help them with management and expansion as well. If they are doing business, we are here to help them.