In this presentation, Frank Rhode, founder and CEO of Ownify, explains how their custom Claude skill dramatically increases mortgage loan officer outreach response rates from the industry‑standard 2‑4% to over 50%. The skill gathers a few self‑reported borrower data points, pulls CRM information from HubSpot, runs high‑level qualification checks (conventional, FHA, USDA, VA, and Ownify’s proprietary fractional‑ownership product), queries live pricing engines (e.g., Optimal Blue), searches a database of ~2,000 down‑payment‑assistance programs, and assembles a personalized home‑ownership plan. The plan outlines the top three financing options, down‑payment assistance, and a concrete action plan, then is reviewed by a human concierge before being emailed to the borrower. The end‑to‑end workflow takes 5‑10 minutes, turning the loan officer from a seller into a trusted advisor and achieving a 52% response rate. The talk includes a live demo for a borrower named Jennifer, details of the skill’s 3,000‑line compliance‑focused instruction set, and a call‑to‑action to download the skill from ownifybrex.com for use with Claude Co‑Work, Claude Code, or other LLMs.
Chapters
Hey everyone, my name is Frank Rhode, founder and CEO of Ownify. If you're a mortgage loan officer, there's a really uncomfortable number, which is what's your average response rate to borrower outreach, prospect outreach? I don't actually know the answer, so I'm going to plug it into Claude. Just wrote that. And let's see what it comes back with. But generally that number should be between kind of 2 to 4%. And here's a mind-blowing statistic. We've been able to get it up to 52%. And the way we've been doing this is we've been using Claude. And a skill that we've built to write very specific plans for homeownership for individual consumers. So individual borrowers who hit our website, and what we're doing is we're gathering 5, 6, 7 pieces of information, and we're pinging them back a very much personalized, crafted path to ownership that is written by Claude and the AI and kind of reasoning capability that Claude brings to the table. It's really blown me away in terms of, you know, what the response rate is. Okay, so here's the answer. You know, 1 to 5% reply rate, well-executed campaigns reaching around 7%. We can get that up to north of 50%. So how? Well, what we've built is a skill. And a skill is basically a set of instructions that Claude uses to still reason but have very specific swim lanes and very specific skills. And those skills break down into a number of components. It's about 3,000 lines of detailed instructions and And a lot of it is compliance related, right? So you've got your federal and your state mortgage lending laws. You've got fair lending and credit reporting and TILA, RESPA, TRID, all of the fancy abbreviations. Basically a fair number, a fair amount of what we're doing is making sure that, you know, whatever we're putting out there is compliant. But the way the process works is that a customer comes to our website or any other sort of intake mechanism, and they give us their name, their address, a couple of data points. Generally, when are you looking to buy? How much are you looking to spend? Do you have a down payment saved? If so, how much? What's your income and what's your credit score? All self-stated, so no backend pull just yet. So let me, let me kick one off here just so you guys can see what this looks like. I'm in my Claude window and just going to start a new task, Cowork, and I'm going to ask, uh, build Home ownership. And so the first thing it does is it looks, is there a Jennifer in our HubSpot? And obviously I know there is. So Claude is now pulling the information for Jennifer out of HubSpot. The first thing it does is it runs through a high-level qualification. Given what she's told us, is she eligible for different types of products, right? So can she get into a conventional? Can she get into an FHA? Maybe a USDA or VA? Is she, you know, military? And we have our own program, Ownify Fractional Ownership. So we evaluate her for that as well. So there's a first step is kind of a high-level qualification analysis. The second step then is it actually logs— Claude, now using this skill, logs into a third-party pricing engine. So that could be an Optimal Blue. We use our own pricing engine that looks up the current today mortgage rates, right? And pulls live rates and basically refines that estimate in a little bit more detail. It then also runs through our own fractional ownership. So this is a proprietary product we've built that lowers the down payment, lowers the monthly payment, fractional ownership structure. It runs through that process. So that's kind of step 2, 3, and 4 here. It then logs into a down payment assistance resource. So DPR subscription that we have, and that national or nationwide has about 2,000 or so down payment assistance programs. And we run through all of those down payment assistance programs to establish Is she potentially eligible for down payment assistance, given her income, given her, whatever we know about her, given the location of the property that she's looking to buy. And then what it's doing, it's, it's creating a personalized plan that takes all of that data, all of the options, and kind of summarizes it into the top 3 options and outlines in plain English, right? What those options look like. And then it turns it into an action plan. And the action plan really is dependent on, again, what we find, right? That could be, you might have to improve your credit, you might have to save a little bit more for a down payment, you might have to wait a little longer. And, and as part of the action plan, obviously one of the things that, that we ask for is schedule a call with an Onify Concierge. And it's on that response, right, on engaging on the action plan that we've seen north of 50% response rate. So really what's happening here is we're turning the equation around from, you know, chasing a borrower to engaging with the borrower right up up front by saying, here's a piece of value. Here's something we've done for you that you can use regardless of whether you use Ownify or not, right? That you can follow. Here's a roadmap and a guide. And what it's done, it has turned us from being a seller into a trusted advisor. And that's really the game changer here, right? We can, we can use AI and this, this tooling and this intelligence that we have to do this in a very automated, very quick fashion. So again, it takes 2, 3 minutes behind the scenes. And once it's done, right now we still have the human in the loop. So Someone on the Ownify team actually looks at this plan and says, does it make sense? Is it correct? Right? It's a very quick review and a scan. And the email that, that is queued up to the customer is ready to send. So all the Ownify concierge has to do is, you know, as a licensed loan officer, look at this and say, okay, is this good to go? Yes, good to go. And it goes out. So the whole thing takes, you know, 5 to 10 minutes from when someone hits the website. And what they're getting is really this personalized plan, which is much, much more powerful than sending out a rate sheet or sending out a, you know, hey, Hey, call me, or let's find time to chat, et cetera. It starts the conversation with us delivering value. And that's really the game changer here. All right. So let me show you what's going on behind the scenes here. And I'll switch over to the, the actual plan. All right. So this is what Claude built, right? It's a personalized homeownership plan for Jennifer. It starts by outlining the homeownership goals based on what she submitted on our website. She's looking to buy a home in Durham, North Carolina. She wants to spend about $400,000. She has income of about $200,000, you know, great self-stated credit score. So it just recaps that financial snapshot. Then it gives her kind of two, the two best options, right? One is a conventional with 3% down. The other one is the FHA. Outlines what her monthly payment might look like. And then kind of goes into detail on why that is, right? And what the choices are and how to think about the 3% down conventional versus the FHA. Right, and the trade-off that exists with, with PMI and upfront MIP. So, so then it positions Ownify as a fractional ownership model, not, not relevant to you if you were to use this skill. It then also outlines here the down payment assistance programs that are available to you, right? And one is the North Carolina HFA. The other one is a specific lending grant, two lending grants actually. So that gives her a little bit more of an idea of what exactly she could do to get down to potentially a 0% down payment. The action plan has a couple of components. One is starting your application, and this is really what we're driving towards, right? She, we are a dual MLO and agent, so she can also sign up for agency with Ownify. She can schedule a call. We have a link to our credit repair partner. Um, you know, just to double-check that there's nothing else on her credit report at 720 self-stated, that's obviously not going to be the case. And then it gives her an outline on what to do in the next 30 days when you're ready to apply. And it has the relevant notes and, or kind of disclosures at the backend. And the whole idea here is really that we lead with advice, right? And something valuable that the customer can use, whether they engage with Ownify or not. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. If you want to use this, go to ownifybrex.com and find the link to download the skill. You can download it and use it with Claude Co-Work or Claude Code or, you know, with other LLMs as well. All this was done with Opus 4.6 as we're recording this, but You know, again, in 2 weeks this will be a heck of a lot better and there'll be a new version. And so this is going to continue to evolve and iterate super fast, which is why it's so exciting to work with this stuff. Thanks, guys.
