As a mortgage broker, you understand the importance of building relationships with real estate agents, financial planners, contractors, and other potential referral sources. Your business network is often your business's lifeblood! While your business relies on referrals, relationship building is a two-way endeavor. What if you could leverage your business network for mortgage lead generation while also helping your referral sources enhance their own value propositions? Online portals could be exactly what you're looking for.
What are Online Mortgage Lead Portals?
You're likely familiar with online these lead portals. In fact, your company may already be benefiting from various online forms that third party lead generation vendors use to generate interest, provide instant rate quotes, and capture contact information. Online lead portals are self-service tools that prospects discover and use to find out how much a loan will cost them. Dropdown text boxes and other form controls allow prospects to select their criteria (such as type, purchase price, down payment amount, and credit type) and get real-time quotes. They are also prompted to enter their contact information so that a lender, or in some cases multiple lenders, can follow up.
How You Can Use Online Mortgage Portals to Generate Your Own Mortgage Leads
Third party mortgage lead vendors use online portals to generate leads that they then sell to mortgage brokers. Both exclusive and shared mortgage leads are offered. With an exclusive arrangement, you are the only mortgage broker to receive the leads. With a shared arrangement, you and several other brokers will share the leads. As you know, exclusive leads are costlier than shared leads. However, sharing leads means that you need to act quickly before one of your competitors wins the business.
Having your own mortgage lead portal on your own website allows you to use the same technologies the big vendors use while keeping all of the leads for yourself. You can provide mortgage shoppers with a convenient way to find out what their mortgage or refinance will cost as well as capture contact information. From there, you can nurture, engage, and convert leads without going through a third party. You can also use your own mortgage lead portal in conjunction with third party vendors if desired.
How to Extend this Strategy to Your Business Network
So far, this makes a lot of sense from a mortgage broker's perspective, but what about your business network? Why would they want to get involved?
Your online lead generation portals are portable and can be hosted virtually anywhere. By offering real estate agents, financial planners, interior designers, contractors, and other business professionals an online tool, you are helping them to differentiate themselves from the competition and add value to their own service offerings. For example, imagine a Realtor's website featuring an attractive 4-bedroom home in a desirable neighborhood. With your portal prominently featured, potential buyers could quickly find out how much that home would cost them per month based on their specific financial situation - all without having to make a phone call or wander away from the Realtor's website. This benefits the buyer and the real estate agent while delivering qualified mortgage leads directly to you. Now that's a win-win situation.
Frank Shields is the author of this article about how to increase mortgage lead generation by leveraging your business network or using a type of lending software.