7-5-2021 How are LO’s Increasing Purchase Volume With Ben Teerlink
In our Hot Topic this week we have Ben Teerlink, CEO/Founder at MobilityMMI & MobilityRE....
The discussion will focus on Mobility’s Market Intelligence product and how they became the leader in mobile real estate technology, more specifically how LO’s are using their new technology to connect with the purchase side of their business!!
Want to know more aboutBen Teerlink?
Ben Teerlink, CEO/Founder at MobilityMMI & MobilityRE
Having been in real estate for years prior, as well as having earned multiple top producer recognitions, Ben was looking for a way to improve and enhance the mobile technology he could offer both his clients and potential new clients in the local real estate market.
To read more about this episode click here!!
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How are LO's Increasing Purchase Volume With Ben Teerlink
Welcome, everybody. Happy 4th of July. I hope you're enjoying your 4th of July weekend. It is Monday, July 5th. Most of us are off somewhere celebrating our holiday. I am so grateful for this nation and our independence. This show was created by mortgage professionals. It is for mortgage professionals and we're so grateful to have you as our audience. As we say in each episode, our commitment is to bring you timely information that you can access anytime and anywhere.In our Hot Topic Segment, I've got, Ben Teerlink who joined me from Mortgage Market Intelligence, also, MobilityRE. They are one of our sponsors. One of the reasons I had him come on is because I was interested in hearing what he is seeing as far as trends of how loan originators are using this kind of data that's available through his technology to help bolster their purchase business. There are some wonderful ways. We invited Ben Teerlink, the President and CEO of Mobility MMI to come on and join us. I think you'll enjoy the interview. Stay tuned all the way to the Hot Topic Segment.Let's say a special thank you to Industry Syndicate for our partnership with them. I urge you to check all the podcasts at IndustrySyndicate.com. Also, a special thank you goes out to our sponsors, the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, as well as Finastra, Fusion Mortgagebot Solution, which is a leading point of sale technology. I heard that more and more banks use a lot of it.Independent mortgage bankers need to step up and get involved. At least, check this out. It's a very powerful tool. I love the data that they bring. It's a large company. They are the third-largest FinTech company in the world. You need to check out what they're doing and the power that it can bring you all. Also, Lenders One. We had Justin Demola on the show.We also had Mitch Kider talking about the Supreme Court ruling that resulted in Mark Calabria being removed as the Director of FHFA and some changes going on there. We focused on all that was behind that. Also, Justin Demola was on there, and he was awesome as always. Also, The Mortgage Collaborative. Tom Gallucci and the team at The Mortgage Collaborative are doing a great job, as well as the Lenders One.Both these co-ops bring lenders and vendors together. They do so in a unique way of allowing you to get to know what others in the marketplace your size are doing. It’s a great peer-to-peer data and conversations. Every one of these conferences is so powerful that both Lender One and TMC or The Mortgage Collaborative have. The Lenders One conference is coming up this summer in Orlando in early August. Check that out on their website, as well as The Mortgage Collaborative has theirs coming up in September.Also, we have The Community Mortgage Lenders of America. It’s another independent mortgage banking association with a great independent mortgage banker. They are some of the larger ones. They also work with the MBA in having their voice heard on the Hill. Check out The Community Mortgage Lenders also known as CMLA.Also, Josh Friend does a great job with Insellerate, engaging consumers more effectively, prospects, as well as past customers. This is a CRM technology with telephony built in it but it's the strategies that Josh brings to your company through Insellerate. Be sure to check out Josh Friend. We had him on the show talking about this. Every time we have him on, he's sharing some great best practices, ideas, and innovations on how you can capture the consumer in a more effective and intelligent way.Also, check out Ken Perry's Knowledge Coop. If you're looking for a learning management system. We are grateful to have them as a sponsor. Also, Mobility MMI, who is our guest in this episode, Ben Teerlink, as well as Modex, which also does a great job. They are competitors, Mobility MMI and Modex but they complement. We use both of them and recommend you consider doing so as well. I love Dale Larson III.Dale and his dad do a great job of continuing to move the ball forward and advance on the data. There is so much about data and both of these companies, Mobility MMI and Modex, have great access and tools. Manipulating the data is probably what their differentiators are. Check both of them out. Also, I want to say a special thank you to Rob, Les, Alice, Allen, and Matt for their contributions to the show each and every week.This is the Hot Topics Segment and we have as our guest in this episode, Ben Teerlink of Mobility MMI. Also, MobilityRE. We're going to talk about some of the trends that he's seeing with the data and how LOs and originators are using his technology to more effectively connect with the purchase side of the business. I thought I'd invite him back to the show. He is one of our show sponsors. We're grateful for the sponsorship, Ben. It's good to have you back, friend.
Thanks, David. It’s always nice to be on here and it’s a fun subject for us to talk about in this episode.
It is a fun topic, but you've got some great data, especially when you look at the focus of how we flopped in where the market has been. The first question to you is how you are seeing the loan originator's percentage of the purchase to refi in the 2020 flip-flop.
At first, I take it that I am a geek with the data. I hear new stats, I see data, and I get excited about it. Our team here gets excited about it. It's always nice to talk about it. The goal is to try and make sense of it and explain it in a way that people can then use to take advantage of. It was so interesting as we've seen. We would check. We would look at all the originators in 2020. We would look at their purchase versus refi percentages.
You look historically at what that is and you see this huge flip-flop of so many of these LOs. You're seeing this 70/30 or 60/40, depending on what they're doing. The refi is on the high end of that and maybe only 30% purchase or 40% if they're lucky. Watching that happen, rates are incredible and have been. That's why it drove that. It’s still great where they are but we're seeing that everyone had flip-flopped.
[bctt tweet="When everyone flip-flopped as mortgage rates went up and down, they looked for ways to maintain their current level of production volume." username=""]
As everyone sees rates go up, they'll come out down a little bit, and it goes back up. It has got everyone to start thinking, “What am I going to do to try and maintain this level of production volume that I have?” It's not all going to be refi. It's going to have to start making more purchases to try to keep up with the huge volumes that everyone pushed through in 2020 on the refis. That's what has been interesting for us to watch and see and find ways to do that.
Let's talk about some of the ways you are seeing LOs using your technology to transition over to a purchase business while maintaining production levels. Are you seeing people maintain production levels making that transition?
It's very cool to see this because the productions are so big, and so many people do so much volume. We pulled graphs to show how much of it is purchased and how much of its refi. You can even see a lot of LOs hold that purchase way ahead of the refi at the beginning of the year, and see that their volume levels are still there. The ways that we're seeing them do this is one, focusing on the realtor relationships they've had, going back to them, revisiting, and making sure that they are engaged, have those relationships, and get that.
I'm excited to talk about one product that you have or one feature of your product. It's called Agent Wallet Share. You have some reports that are unique and I'm not sure many people are aware of this because many people think of you as Mobility from the standpoint of identifying loan originators, but you have so much technology and data to be able to look at the realtor aspects of the business.
We feel like it's timely with this transition that everyone is trying to make to maintain the production level and work those realtor relationships. We pull all of that and have the information. The report you mentioned, the Agent Wallet Share report is helpful for an originator to look at all the realtors they've done deals with. We pull all that in without them needing to enter anything in or tie into their system. We have it and we show that LO. We say, “These are your realtors you've done deals with and this is how many you did with them.”
You can look at that and say, “I did well with John the agent and with Jane the agent but then the column over here says, “However, look how many buy-side deals John and Jane the agents did this year?” You ended up getting 35% of their business. Even though you closed ten deals with them and you felt good about that, it's great to close ten deals with this agent but you're only getting maybe a third or maybe half of their business.
Being able to see that and see this long list of agents that maybe you've done one deal with or maybe you've done twenty deals with, but now seeing what that market share percentage is amongst each of your agents has helped our LOs focus on, “I had no clue Jane agent was doing this much volume. I thought I was getting all of it. I'm getting half.”
Purchase Volume: Being able to see this long list of agents you have done deals with in the past will allow you to easily see the market share percentage of each individual.It’s less than half of it. I think that's great. Are LOs using this data or is corporate using this data and then pushing this information out to the LOs?
There are several different ways. We've seen it at the corporate level and a lot of that on the recruiting side. Now with this shift, we're seeing that it's being passed down to where the individual LO wants to log in and see their individual realtor relationships to see their percentage. Also, use some of the tools within the dashboard to connect with that realtor, receive notifications, and do other things as triggers and reasons to reach out to them to build and maintain that relationship with their realtors.
One of the things that have been most effective on the individual LO being able to log in is not only can they see the percentage of business they're getting but then they can click through and say, “I want to see where those other deals did go, who my competition is, why I'm losing this type of loan to this other company,” and then being able to have that conversation with your agent, “I wanted you to know we have this good jumbo program and this is what we can do there.”
It will help that realor to realize, “Maybe I don't need to be sending all those over to this other person. I like this LO but I didn't realize they could do these types of loans.” It's giving you that full picture of, “Here's who, here's where it's going, why you might not be getting it, and what you should be talking about.”
Are you helping loan officers or companies work through the data? Is there a consulting feature for that? Is that accurate to say?
Yeah, absolutely because we trained on it.
How much do you come back and work with companies on best practices and how they might use your data that you might see being done in one place that could be done at another place?
That's an awesome question and we do quite a bit of it. We feel like there's one thing to know the data or to have access or have it sitting in a dashboard but we do a lot of hands-on live training and roll out best practices to show everyone. It's going to vary on who you're meeting with. We'll meet with individual LOs and talk about one thing. We'll meet with branch managers and talk about other things and different reports there.
We say, “These are conversations you're going to want to have with your LOs and your branch,” or, “LOs, this is something you're going to want to talk to your realtors about. These are the notifications you'll receive.” We do a lot of that to help everyone fully understand what it's capable of, what has been successful, and what they may be able to do to see the needle move when they implement some of those.
Are you getting in and seeing strategies? For example, the way of approaching a realtor. Do you get any of that feedback?
We do. It's cool because we like to open up our training where it's interactive and people will share within either their branch or company and say, “I tried this. I did this. This is what happened.” We hear some awesome success stories of how they've built relationships with agents, and how they do this each quarter. That generates this many relationships and it equates to this many loans. It's pretty cool to watch and hear that.
When you look at different ways that new realtor relationships are being established, and if you could talk a little bit about that, what are you seeing as far as the trends there? What are the things that are working?
We found that for years, LOs have wanted to work with agents but so often you go out and have a conversation with an agent and you may take him to lunch. Even now, restaurants are open and you can go take someone to lunch and have a conversation, and you do that. Maybe you go golfing and all these things only to find out that the agent is part-time. They have another full-time job. They do a couple deals on the side and LOs has been spending a bunch of time trying to win over the relationship and business.
What we've found is that this tool is helping the LO narrow and pinpoint the agents doing the business and the type of business in that market or area that the LO focuses on or wants to focus on. We create these searches to say, “I want to find agents from this type of volume or this much volume in this city or this area.” You can then select the agent, go into the details, see who they're already using as a lender, and say, “They don't use any particular LO across the board. It's all over the place. I want to reach out, bring them into my CRM, start a drip campaign, and start conversations.” It’s cool to be able to help them find that area in that production that they could talk to and be laser-focused on.
Purchase Volume: Mobility’s market intelligence product aims to help LOs narrow and pinpoint agents, allowing them to determine the areas they really want to focus on.When it comes to more effectively finding the realtors and stopping the process of spinning your wheels with agents, what are you seeing, and how people are using your technology? Try to describe the process. When they log into your screen into your system, they're going to go where and how they search. How difficult is it? I've been in this system. It's not difficult. That's why I want to let our audience get a sense and feel for how easy it is.
What we've done is created what we see as a simple and easy way to navigate what you'd like to try and find and pull out. What a lot of LOS will do is they’ll go in. They’ll say, “I want to find either the top brokerage or the top agents in this particular area.” They'll say, “I am in this area. I need to go to this state or this county. I'm going to narrow it all the way down to this city. I want to find agents that did between say $4 million and $8 million in buy-side volume over the last year. I want to make sure that they did a minimum number of transactions of maybe sixteen deals. I don't want this to be an agent that did two high-end deals and hit their $8 million mark and production volume. That's not who I am after.”
They put in all these filters to say, “This is the ideal agent that I could work with,” and then you hit search. It returns this list of all the agents that match that criteria. You can now click through each one of those. Let’s say there were 200 agents that matched that. Now, I'm going to look at each of them. When you click on that agent, it will show how much they did in purchases and how much they did on the list side. “Here are the lenders or individual loan officers that they've sent deals to and how many they sent to them.” It helps you see the opportunity and say, “This is an agent that is doing the volume, the price range, and everything that fits exactly what I would like to be doing.” You have the ability to interact and communicate with those agents and start that conversation. It's been an awesome way.
I used to be in the industry for 47 years or so. It was a long time ago. I used to work with an agent up in the Seattle area when I started my career in Seattle. I happened to work with the particular agent who was extremely successful but she only worked six months out of the year. I didn't discover that until around the sixth month. All of a sudden, all the business coming from her and I go, “Where are you?” She goes, “I take the second six months off, Dave. I work my butt off and I have a great life. I do these other things. I love to travel.” She did well enough six months out of the year.I quickly figured it out. You do find those patterns. You find patterns of certain people being successful during this time of the year because they're not working as hard when their kids are home. If it's a working mom, she could sell more homes when the kids are at school and then the kids are home during the summer months. You can start recognizing those patterns. I love the fact that you have the ability to recognize the patterns. How difficult are they to see in your system?
We give you this graph that shows, “In the summer, they're not doing any business, but in the fall and spring, it peaks. They did this many deals this month and this. Also, it helps you to see, “They're doing all their volume as a listing agent. They don't even touch buyers, but here's their team and this is who deals with the buyers. That's who I should be talking to.”
“I have a great relationship with this agent. Even though they're only doing listings, they could make an intro now for me to their buyer's agent so that I can start helping them with their buyers.” It points all that out to you so that you can be effective. We find that so often, it's like, “Don't go buy a list of 2,000 realtors and just start texting and emailing them all.” It's not effective. Be laser focused and doing the business that you want and where you want to be and having those conversations.
[bctt tweet="Don’t buy a list of 2000 realtors and then contact them all. Be laser-focused and do your mortgage business where you really want." username=""]
Looking back, how many LOs have had a large amount of past refinance business? Are there ways that they can capture those past clients for purchase activity? How do you do that?
We've tried to look at the shifts. We talked about it earlier. Everyone had an awesome volume with a bunch of refis. How can we help the LO transition to keep that volume and do it through purchase? What we've created are different tools and ways to help adapt and make that happen. What we do is we pull in all of those previous deals, not just from 2020, but we even go beyond that. There isn't anything that the LO needs to add themselves. We have all of that information and it shows the LO, “These are all your previous deals.”
What we'll do is monitor those against all the new listings that hit every single day. We find that even though inventory is low, everyone sat at home a whole lot more in the last year than they ever have. People have realized, “I need a little more room. I would like to have a little bigger home or it'd be nice to have a home with a pool in the back. We'd like to sell this one and upgrade to this.”
What this will do is help the LO to be notified that, “This is a client you refied 8 months ago, 14 months ago, or whatever it may be and they just listed their home this morning.” You probably should have a conversation with them to say, “What are you up to? You just list your home. I would love to get your most recent pay stubs to get everything ready for you so that we can have you set to purchase whatever it is next.”
Someone is buying their home to say, “We have a special deal and our lenders are willing to give you some special program.” That way, they're also in better control of the buyer getting the financing if they're going through their own lender that they had a good experience with. It can go both ways. It’s a very powerful tool.
It's been cool to get some success stories. We've talked to LOs that are using the platform that had 90% refi last year. All of a sudden, they're calling and saying, “I got a bunch of purchase deals from all these past refis that are now buying. I got notified. I called them and I did their deals.” It's helpful to get that purchase.
It's intelligent. A lot of lenders, as well as mortgage loan originators, are looking and working off of credit pull alerts. That's one way to do that, but your system is going to be much more effective, I would assume. Talk about that.
We take the feedback we get from all of those utilizing our platform. There are a lot of people that use it. There are thousands and thousands of people in there every day using it and getting alerts. We take that feedback. We like to relay that and say, “Credit pull is effective because you'll know that your client has inquired about a loan.” What happens is everybody else gets notified of that too. All of a sudden, you have 8 or 10 lenders calling that person saying, “Can I help you? It looks like you're looking for a loan.”
That can get a little annoying for the consumer because they have all these people calling now on these credit pulls, and it's almost instant. They pull credit and their phone starts ringing. We've honed in on getting that notification as close to when that home gets listed as possible. We find if you notify the LO 3 days, 7 days, or 10 days later, it’s too late. I saw here locally, that the average day on the market is six days, which blows my mind. That's too late.
With this, it's a warm call to your past client saying, “I saw that you listed. I would love to help you with that next one. I have everything in the file. All I need is the most recent pay stubs, this and this.” It’s so effective. With this, you should be a few days ahead of anyone else getting a listing alert, and you're not competing against all the credit pulls with the ten other lenders calling on that side. That's where we've seen it so effective on that listing alert.
You have a unique position in the industry. What are you seeing as the trends generally as far as the use of data as it correlates to the success of a loan originator? Is that a direct correlation? It seems like it would be.
It is, and I think it's because you can focus in and be so much more effective with your time and with what you're doing to generate that business than if you're just throwing all kinds of things out there and hoping something sticks. We are seeing that the lenders and the LOs are using data and educating themselves on what they need to do and how they need to do it, and then taking it a step further. Having the data and knowing something is great, but it's not going to do anything for you unless you take action on that.
Purchase Volume: Having the data and knowing something is great. But it will not do anything for you until actually take action on that.
That's the second part of what we've done. We tied into and integrate it with so many CRMs to say, “We're going to show you everything and we're going to notify you of everything, but then you have to take action. You have to now go out and talk to your past client. You have to talk to that realtor partner of yours. You got to do all these things. We're seeing that those who are doing it are having a ton of success. It is moving the needle and making them so much more effective.
You talked a little bit earlier about the training college you're having where you're getting people on and there is an open source sharing of different ways of people are using that.
Our teams are doing it all day every day.
In a group setting, where others can benefit from getting knowledge and expertise from others. How often is that going on?
We'll do that and we typically find that it's within a company. We haven't done a ton where it's just an open forum where any company can jump in and talk about success stories and who's doing what. It's typically within a company setting where we'll jump on and we might have maybe a couple hundred people log in, interact, and share strategy in the chat section and unmuting with their video and explaining. It varies that way but we hear those stories every day as people interact and do that. We even get random emails where people tell us what they did and how effective it was and say thanks. It's nice.
Do you have any idea where this date is going to take us? How is this industry changing? From your perspective, where are we heading?
We all get smarter as we get more data and there's more available to us. I feel like the entire industry is having to deal with this and it's not just on the mortgage side. It's also on the real estate side. You realize that the consumer has more data at their fingertips. The lenders do and the realtors do. I think it's a matter of knowing this and then adjusting and adapting to say, “This is what's out there, but I'm going to be more effective now at taking this and putting my action plan in place and doing it.”
[bctt tweet="We get smarter as we get more data available to us." username=""]
I think that's going to be the same for the lenders. I think it's the same for a title and for real estate agents as all of us now have so much more data than we ever thought imaginable. It's going to continue that way. I think it's more and more, but it's a matter of adapting to it and incorporating it into your business. Also, being more effective and then acting on it.
It's encouraging to see what is available to us. I think it's going to be more and more data. Those who are going to be most successful in the future are the ones who are taking advantage of these kinds of tools. One question that just came in. How would you describe the difference between MobilityRE and Mortgage Market Intelligence?
We have to explain that here. We've been around for a long time, about twelve years in total. Our MobilityRE products are co-branded tools that allow a lender to work with their real estate partners. It's a co-branded home search app. It's co-branded single property pages and brochures. It's all of those tools that you can reach out to an agent and say, “Let's do this,” and do it in a way that it's beneficial to both of us. We can generate business.” It's something that we create and it’s the real estate tools there with your realtor partners.
Market Intelligence is a separate product and a different animal in and of itself. What it's doing is showing you what's happening in the market across the board. Mortgage side, real estate side title side, wholesale, retail, brokers, and all of those things. What we talked about is knowing about it but then doing something about it. We've figured that these two work hand in hand to say, “Let's show you what you probably want to go do in terms of who you want to work with.” Now, you've got these tools that you can use as a conversation starter and a way to work together with these realtor partners to succeed and generate more business and more leads. It’s how we've run the two. Even though they're separate, they do work hand in hand with each other.
It’s great information. I want to thank you so much for coming on and willing to be on the show on this holiday weekend. I appreciate you taking the time to join us and be with us. Thank you so much.
Thank you, David. It’s always a pleasure to be on the show and sponsor.
How could people get ahold of you? The websites that the mortgage lenders should be going to.
You can go to MMI.io which will give you some information. You can get the demos and videos of what it is and does. You can also go to MobilityRE for the co-branded realtor products and tools there. Either of those will get you where you need to go.
Thank you so much for being with us. I love your product. You're doing an awesome job of serving our community. I appreciate it.
Thanks, David. Take care.
Next week, we have Dr. Cindy McGovern joining us. She wrote a book that I enjoyed reading. It's called Every Job is a Sales Job: How to Use the Art of Selling to Win at Work. You'll enjoy the book. You'll enjoy the interview. Be sure to come back here as we have that interview. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsors. Finastra, CMLA, Lenders One, Insellerate, Mobility MMI, Modex, The MBA, Knowledge Coop, and Mortgage Collaborative. It's Time to Say Goodbye, to let the voice of Paul King wrap this up. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to share this with others. I appreciate it. See you back here next time.
