Mortgage Leads, Overcoming Objections
If you are a loan officer or mortgage broker, and you are obtaining leads from a mortgage lead provider, it is important that you get the best return on your investment that you possibly can.
For starters, understand that a lead provider does just that, they provide you with leads. It is entirely up to you to make the sale.
When you call potential customers, it is not unlikely to be confronted with objections, regardless of where your leads are coming from.
Here are a few tips for overcoming some of these objections.
If you call a customer and they say that they are no longer interested, it is most likely because they lost their nerve.
Purchasing or refinancing a home is a very big financial deal, so it is understandable if your customer gets cold feet.
Say something to this effect in the nicest voice you have . . .
Oh, Im very sorry to hear that, after looking at the on-line form you filled out, I was able to fit you into one of our programs that I am sure you would be interested in.
If a customer tells you that they are working with someone else. They either really are, or again, they have lost their nerve.
Say something to this effect . . .
Im really sorry to hear that. We offer some really nice products and I only wanted to take a minute of your time to go over some of our programs.
Although these approaches will get the customer talking the majority of the time, there are the times when it does not work.
Here are a few other things you can do . . .
Most lead providers supply you with an e-mail address, so e-mail them with some attractive products and tell them briefly about the benefits of working with you and your company.
Also, you can mail them out some flyers with some products that you believe would meet their mortgage needs along with some of your business cards.
Whatever happens on your sales call, do not give up after one objection. If you have not been having success with your leads, than you need to change your approach.
Remember. The lead provider cant do the selling for you. Best of luck with your leads.
Mortgage lead generation
If you are a loan officer or a mortgage broker looking for a good lead source, one of the first things you will want to do when considering a mortgage lead company is find out how they go about generating their leads.
How a mortgage lead company generates their leads is very important because it has a lot to do with the quality of the leads you will be receiving.
If a lead company is buying their leads from another source, than what they are doing is recycling leads. And who knows how many times that third party company has sold the leads to other companies.
Your chances of closing a loan on a lead that has gone through the hands of fifteen other loan officers before it reached your desk are slim to none. So steer clear of recycled leads.
Some lead companies have one data base with thousands of leads that they continue to sell over and over again. They will sell them cheap, but most times you are required to buy in bulk. These leads are usually six months to a year old and sometimes more. This is also known as recycling. An even better way to describe this is selling junk.
Look for the lead companies that obtain their leads from web sites that they own and operate them selves. These types of companies receive fresh leads on a daily basis and will sell them in real time. So, by the time you receive the lead, it is only a few seconds old.
The best way for you to determine where a mortgage lead company generates their leads is to call and speak with someone in customer service.
Ask them the direct question, how do you obtain your leads? If you are not satisfied with the answer they give you, than chances are, you will not be happy with the leads they send you.
Mortgage Equity Withdrawal – The Refinancing Trend
Mortgage Equity Withdrawal is the formal name for equity refinance, reverse mortgages or simply home loans based on equity (as the security for the loan).
Mortgage Equity Withdrawal rose to 8.7 billion pounds in the second quarter of this year to its highest since the third quarter last year, official data showed (on Tuesday 4th Oct 2005).
Mortgage Equity Withdrawal is a measure of the equity Britons have extracted from their homes but which they have not re-invested in property.
Sharply rising house prices in the last few years have encouraged a trend where Britons refinance their mortgages to extract cash which many economists say has helped support spending.
The Bank of England said that Mortgage Equity Withdrawal was up sharply from 6.437 billion in the first quarter of this year although it is still well below the 14.5 billion seen one year ago, when house prices were rising more than 20 percent annually.
The Bank of England has since cut interest rates by a quarter of 1% to 4.5 percent which could support Mortgage Equity Withdrawal in coming months, particularly as there are signs that the property market may be stabilizing after a year of stagnation.
As a percentage of post-tax income, Mortgage Equity Withdrawal rose to 4.2 percent from 3.2 percent in the first quarter of the year but is well down on 7.3 percent seen a year ago.
” Mortgage Equity Withdrawal appears to have found its way into increased holdings of financial assets (equities, bonds) as much as extra spending,” said Geoffrey Dicks, UK economist at RBS Financial Markets.
“Generally the pick-up in Mortgage Equity Withdrawal is probably indicative of more `normalization’ of the housing market but while it is saved rather than spent, the policy implications are not huge.”
Official data last month (September) showed the saving ratio rose to 5 percent in the second quarter of this year from 4.5 percent in Q1 (also of this year).
Separate figures showed UK residential construction barely grew in September, putting in its weakest monthly performance since May.
But what does this mean in real terms?
There are several key points in this statement, these are:
1.People are refinancing their homes because of increased value
2.People are not necessarily spending the money on the property
3.People are not necessarily spending the money in the high street
These three points are important to all of us, not just the policy makers. Heres why.
Lets consider the first point, people are refinancing there homes because the equity has grown rapidly.
This statement tells us that the housing market although not sky rocketing as it was a couple of years ago, is none the less still rising.
The second point tells us that when people effectively withdraw this money it is not to improve the home itself, hence the equity of the property will not grow at a better rate than market rate.
The third point is perhaps most telling, people are not taking the money and spending it in a hap hazard manner but are potentially saving it (bonds, shares, bank accounts).
So what do this mean for us?
Well, its a bit of mixed signals heads up if you like.
The general population (property owners) are slipping into ever increasing levels of debt (if youre refinancing your mortgage or freeing up equity as the agents put it, you are effectively borrowing money) unless its a reverse mortgage.
People who are refinancing are not improving the quality of the property with the money and so if the market takes a fall their property will devalue as much as the next property (whereas if theyd returned some of the capital into improvements they would at least be sitting on a lesser slump in value).
Finally, and perhaps the most damming sign is that people are saving more, this is not a good sign. In a healthy economy the rate of saving is low, this is primarily because confidence is high (people arent worried about the bills or their jobs) but the fact that more people are now starting to save money rather then spending it means that the retail sector will be taking a hit, this means that the bottom end jobs will be in danger, this in turn has a knock on effect in the service sector and becomes a vicious circle the end result being market stagnentation .
But what this trend does illustrate quite simply is that you can potentially get more money back in savings interest than you pay out in refinancing interest so at the moment the smart moneys in equity refinance.
Mortgage Cycling Secrets Revealed
Have you heard about mortgage cycling? Maybe you’ve seen the ads for books on this “secret technique” for paying off your mortgage sooner. Is there some useful information in them? Yes, especially if you are not familiar with the basic premise that you can pay extra principle every year and you’ll pay off the loan sooner and save thousands on interest.
Mortgage cycling is dressed up as a “new” system, and of course there are many little tricks to doing this most effectively. There are more risky techniques too, like using short-term home-equity loans to pay down your primary mortgage now. This latter technique could cost you more in interest or even put you into financial trouble that leads towards foreclosure.
The safest way of “mortgage cycling” is to just put large lump sums of money towards your mortgage loan every few months to a year. Pay thousands of pounds extra per year, and you will pay off your loan many years sooner. No surprise there, right, but what if you don’t have the hundreds of pounds a month extra needed to do this?
Money For Mortgage Cycling
Don’t assume you can’t come up with SOME extra money, at least each year. Some will say they can’t, and yet still add hundreds of pounds per month to credit card payments from buying anything from expensive shoes to snowmobiles. There’s nothing wrong with buying these things, but the choice is yours if you want to pay down that mortgage instead.
You can also pay off large chunks of principle by using your annual tax refund, insurance settlements that are not otherwise allocated, and any cash gifts or prizes you may receive.
How much sooner you can pay off your mortgage depends on how much extra you pay and when. The sooner you pay extra money towards the principle, the better. Let’s demonstrate with a simple example, just making an extra payment each month.
Suppose you have a 160,000 30-year mortgage at a 7% annual interest rate. Regular monthly payments would be 1064.40. If you looked at your second payment you would see that it’s composed of 932.57 interest and 131.83 principle (the amount you actually pay down the loan). Just add 131.83 to your normal payment of 1064.40, and you have taken an entire month off the time it will take to pay off your mortgage.
If you did this each month, you would cut the time to pay off your loan in half. The principle part of the payment would be growing with each payment, so the extra payment would be a little more each month (around 137 by the end of the first year), but hopefully over the years your income will rise enough to afford that. Consider that if you pay normally, your last year of the mortgage you’ll pay 12,772.80 (1064.40 x 12 months). On the other hand, pay about an extra 1600 that first year, in the way shown above, and you’ll eliminate that entire last year – a savings of over 11,000!
Other ways to pay off extra principle need to be evaluated carefully. You could, for example, put a few thousand of your savings towards the loan now and save perhaps tens of thousands in interest over the years. However, will you then need to pay even higher credit card rates because you emptied your savings account and need some money? You could cash in stocks and apply the money to the loan, but will you be giving up a 9% return to pay down a 7% mortgage? You may also want to consider paying off any debts with higher interest rates before you apply extra money to your mortgage.
To keep it simple, set aside extra money every month and apply it to the loan. Then use any other money that may otherwise be squandered (like tax refunds). If you just do a few simple things to pay something extra on the loan each year, and you can forget about complicated mortgage cycling plans.