From Misery to Mastery: Early Borrower Engagement & Education for Success

All right, While people are piling in here, we're going to give it some time.

Piling in. I love that. And I love your vest, Richard.

Thank you. Subtle, right?

Does it come with the collar up or do you have to put it up yourself?

That's what all the kids are doing. I'm just trying to be cool these days, man.

Okay, well, you look. You look model esque. And I was hoping maybe. I was hoping maybe Brian could put more things on his shelves back there so we can be a little more distracted when he talks.

It's.

It's working already.

Perfect. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. That's a. You need a housekeeper just for your shelves.

I think Brian does. I think he catches everybody on cnbc. They're professional interviewees.

That's right.

You know exactly what they're doing in the background.

No doubt.

Everybody, while you're joining, why don't you write in where you're joining from in the. In the chat, and if you know any of these folks, give them a shout.

So my. The trick, the. The whole. This whole back, you know, shelf thing, I was. I can't remember who I was talking to, but she said with all this, the Zoom meetings, one of the tricks that she learned was to start putting different knickknacks behind her and. And people would, like, get fixated on it, and it would. It would create a conversation off of it. Not necessarily for seminars and webinars, but, you know, more for one on one conversation. So I. Maybe I've got carried away. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gotten a lot busier since I've gotten to know you over the last six to eight months. It used to be there was just a picture, I think, of your son playing ball.

Yeah, he's up there somewhere. He's maybe hidden right now.

Yeah, I mean, I get it. Your house is so big you can bounce from room to room. Must be. Must be nice. Very, very good.

No, no, no, no, no.

Well, hey. Hey, Faith. How's it going? Good to see you, Faith. Howard Mooney giving a shout out to all the folks here. Basically. Let's see. In the house.

Good Lord. Larry Freed. Calm. Calling out my Elon days. Samantha. Very cool.

We'll get started in, I think give it one more minute and then we'll get started. All right.

I see my buddy Mike Kush has joined. That's awesome. Hey, Mike.

All right, let's get one question. I got one question for both you, Steve, and you, Greg. What's the most Useless fact that each of you know.

Wow.

I like to start off with the real hard questions. You know what I mean?

I'm terrible at this game.

So.

So am I. I'm really bad at it. I just have too much going on in my brain right now. I can't.

Trust me, Richard, there are a lot of useless facts up here between my ears. But.

You know, a better question might be, a more interesting question might be when is the last time we slept through the night?

Oh, it wasn't last night.

Yeah. I mean, for me, maybe it's been two years. I don't know.

I don't know. I, my I, I wear, this is wearable technology. My whoop tells me every reminds me every night how, how I'm not doing well in my sleep category. I'm sleep deficient. Like, like Greg said for the last couple years. Last couple years. Can't make it up.

All right, everybody, let's kick this off. Here we go. We are all here because you're, you've come to this topic. You've come to learn about how to turn, how to elevate the customer experience, right? I think the average bar experience is pretty miserable. A lot of folks, you can see this in a lot of surveys. CFPB puts out a lot of surveys, especially when it comes down to actually put the application and go through the mortgage, but before the mortgage, after the mortgage. And I think there's a lot of room to improve. So improving the, the customer experience at loan application before and after and during the loan application, that's why you're here and really educating the borrower and through education, you know, you can basically raise all ships for the company. And so we've got some fantastic experts here that have agreed to join us and share some of their insights and strategies. Thank you both Greg and Steve and Brian, I'll give you credit too for joining.

Thank you.

But I'm going to let Brian give some introductions in case folks who are joining right now aren't familiar with our panel.

Thanks, Richard and thanks for pulling this together. So for the audience, you know, Richard or Steve and Greg really represent two places in the, in the journey that we want to really drill into today. Steve, as CEO of Synergy One Lending, has really focused a ton of attention around the mortgage manufacturing process. But from the lens of the consumer and at Synergy One, Steve, I know your, your team is, is focused on providing the modern mortgage experience for, for your borrowers and your loan officers alike. So we're really thankful for you to join today. And share your insights and perspectives on all things customer experience. Thanks for joining us.

It's my pleasure.

And Greg, your team at NFM Lending, in particular your influencer division is not just focused on the experience when you get them into the sales funnel, but really is elevated this, this concept of, you know, educating at scale through, through social media and starting to build relationships with your brand through these brand influencers, these, these financial influencers who by the way are licensed loan originators and so really excited to, to kind of peel the onion on what that looks like and kind of how you, you all are shaping, you know, the future of client acquisition through this experience via social media. And thanks, thank you Greg for joining as well.

Well, it's my pleasure to be here. I'm looking at this picture on the screen right now. I, I noticed one of us among the four is not smiling in their photo and I'm just wondering what was going on at the moment when Mr. Majeris had his picture taken. I just don't know anybody's guess.

If you knew, if you knew me better, you would know that is a smile.

I think it was three hours ago when the CPI number.

Well, I'm looking forward to getting to know you better at the gathering, which I know we'll both be attending here in a couple of days.

Yes sir, I look forward to that.

Be good, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate it. I do have some experience in the educational realm, particularly around social media and I look forward to sharing those exploits.

Excellent. So Brian, why don't you set the table for us?

Perfect. So what we thought we would, we kind of kick off is, you know, I think traditionally when we think of, of lending and loan officers specifically, a lot of us through the years are very adept at addressing a consumer when they raise their hand and, and say they're ready to transact, right. They're ready to, to move forward. And on the left of this screen, these are those life events that are always going to be just part of everybody's life irregardless of what rates are doing, you know, whether they're up, they're down, they're sideways. We're going to always be dealing with these D's, these, these life events. And so that's been kind of the, the traditional, you know, way mortgage banking has been done, which has been driven by these life events and traditional referral sources. And, and the future is, it's looking a lot different. And the chart on the right is just kind of painting a fairly grim picture of what's happened with the 30 year mortgage rates. And so a lot of the, the business that was, you know, quote unquote, falling out of trees or falling in our laps is gone. And we're really in this new environment which is all about, mostly about the purchase business, the home buyer, and arguably the largest cohort of that being this first time home buyer, where that bubble continues to grow. So for Steve, we'll let you kind of start here. I'd love to have you just share your perspective on how you're thinking about as CEO of SynergyOne and leading your team, how you're thinking about dealing with business as usual, the life event business, but also with an eye on the next cohort of home buyers in next year's pipeline.

Yeah, I talk a lot about, thanks, Brian. I talk a lot about using various techniques and strategies to be able to accomplish that. But I really start with, as you said, just the sheer mass of size of the millennial and Gen Z population just in terms of the raw numbers of humans, where that market opportunity is. And we know that first time home buyers largely drive the largest segment of the market, as you said. And I've really started a lot of conversations with loan officers around if you solve your business activity strategies for that cohort, as you said, you're going to make a good living for a long time and potentially a great one. And so if you look at that population and the way they live their lives outside of getting a mortgage, which is online, on apps, real, real time access to information, you know, instant gratification experiences, things like that, and apply that to an educational focus and the right way to approach them where they are, obviously you're going to start thinking about, from the highest level, thinking about mobile access to that information and providing that all the way down to local person to person options for that. And given that the size of that cohort is so large that as you gain influence, however you do that in your local market or expanding it through social media or other scalable means, and then you incubate, curate some information around education, things like that. You incubate those people, even if they're not ready for a home buying experience, but you're educating them in that process, therefore you're creating trust with them in that process. And you should de facto be the lender of choice when that time comes because of that. I think about things like, without belaboring the point, I think about even college students. I have a niece that just finished college as a nurse now and called me one Day because she was so enamored with the possibility of taking a personal finance class at the University of Portland because she admitted she had no clue. Harvard requires now freshmen to take a personal finance class because they kept telling high schools and parents, you're sending us kids that absolutely know nothing about it. And I actually looked it up and it covers things like budget and credit and get, getting familiar with base level education elements that are going to be key for decision making, life decision making events for people as it relates to homeownership and other areas. So that's, that's how I really start at the highest level anyway.

I love that Greg. Maybe, maybe to, to kind of add to this and take the, I guess the inverse approach. Right. So you're specifically with your influencer division. I think by default you're really focusing on a longer, a typically longer duration pipeline. But knowing that in our business we need revenues today to just keep the business going and our loan officers need commissions revenues today as well. How do you think about balancing this, this eye on, you know, nurturing and growing tomorrow's pipeline but being in a position to still take advantage of life events that regular consumers are having?

I think the answer to that question is pretty simple. Instead of reinventing the wheel and bringing people on with the sole purpose of teaching them, training them how to influence, you go after people that already have a solid book of business, that understand how to put loans together, that have great referral partners. But see what we see at nfm. And you know, I think everyone on this call sees it, that the business is changing and we're getting to consumers much earlier on in the funnel. And if you're not and you don't, you're going to miss out on sort of a centennial moment. It's a big thing to say, but the behavior of the future consumer is changing right before our eyes. And what I mean by that is Gen Z being the first generation of digital natives, they grew up with their phones in their hands and this is the first cohort to enter the buying process. They have a certain way that they want to behave and transact and largely it's on the phone and largely it's acting on the advice or the sort of common interests of the person they're following most online. So that's where influencing comes in. I always like to joke around and say that, you know, Rocket Mortgage was ahead of their time. You know, it was the idea of push button get mortgage that they spent gazillions and gazillions of dollars on which Never really manifested itself, you know, to the extent that they thought it would. I think that it's really today and in the future more so it's going to be push, follow, get mortgage. And so if you look at Google, you know, which is the platform that we grew up on. Brian. Right. We want to know more about something, we go to Google, we search. It's a ver, you know, late stage millennials and, and Gen Z, TikTok and that little window up at the top and Instagram and that little window up at the top, that's their Google. That's where they do their window shopping. And they really communicate best when they can, when, when a message is resonating with them. And so what happens and what we've seen as we've driven in over 70,000 leads in three years from this influencer division, all organic, meaning we didn't spend a dime on one of those leads. What we found is that people tend to gravitate towards folks that they feel like they have common interests with or they like their message or how they communicate it. So they go to TikTok, they follow a Scott Bentley, who works for us. That mortgage guy is his handle on TikTok. And he's got, he's the most followed originator on the planet by probably 500,000. They go to him, they see what he's doing, and if they, if they like it and they're interested, they follow him and they begin to follow his messages around homeownership. Maybe he's really good at home hacking and how to buy a duplex and live in it rent free, mortgage free by having other people pay the mortgage. And so when they're ready to transact before they call a real estate agent. And in some cases, just when their curiosity is peaked, they're not even ready to buy the home yet, but they're looking at this guy saying, you know, he's really believable. I feel I could trust him. Let me start to go down this journey now. They click a button, they fill out some intake questions, and they enter the funnel. And so when I talk about this idea of people getting into the funnel much earlier, that's kind of what I encourage people to wrap their head around, is that that's how things are substantively changing. And I always make this argument, which I don't think is disputable, that the, the real estate agent to loan officer pie is definitely diminishing in the NAR settlement, I think is just going to exacerbate that, you know, the fact that fees have been decoupled. But this way that we all grew up around, which is the traditional way of a real estate agent, controls the consumer. They decide what lender they're going to use. They hand the lead to the lo. That's changing and I think more and more so as indicative of the stuff that we've been able to accomplish here at NFM is that consumers are raising their hands much earlier. And so you talk about the balance between needing to make money now and the fact that when you get people early on in the funnel, you might not realize revenue for six months a year. The thing you have to understand is you're just planting seeds. So imagine you, you planted a bunch of seeds in one garden and a month later you planted a bunch of others. And a month, eventually it's going to catch up and you're no longer going to be waiting six months. Things are just going to start to hit. And that's what we've seen materialize in NFM through the influencer division.

Love that.

Well, that's super incredible, Greg. I don't think there's a lot of folks out there that are pulling that off quite like you guys are. So, I mean, if anybody listening is doing stuff like that, please throw it in the chat. Let's. I'd love to hear if other people. That's really cutting edge. And I've seen you, I've had the blessing to hear you speak and get into detail about how your team does that at a few different conferences. So it's just awesome. Listen, I want to get some audience participation going here, so we're going to start with a poll. Look, there's a lot of reasons why mortgage lending, like the actual experience, is tough. Like you're giving your personal information to people, right? Very sensitive. Personal, financial, sometimes embarrassing financial information to folks you don't really know. Right. Complete strangers sometimes. So it's already inherently kind of like a little bit embarrassing for a lot of folks and maybe tough, but there's a lot of reasons why, you know, it sucks. And you can see some of the reasons why loans fall out of the pipeline. And you know, for example, like you say you can't find a house, you know, lack of inventory. I'd like to hear kind of from the audience. You know, what are the, what are you seeing as your major reasons why, you know, loans are falling out of your pipeline, which can lead to a. Never a negative experience. And feel free to comment right now if, if one of those isn't on there, if you have Another reason that's not on there. But while that poll's going, I'd like to hear from first, I'd like to hear from Steve and then Greg, you know, why do you think the experience kind of is difficult, more difficult than a lot of other industries overall for completing an application? I think you're on mute there, Steve. Sorry.

It's only been four years since we started doing these zoom calls regularly and still catching up. I think my impression is that, and I always use this analogy is, you know, if your CPA asks you to come to an appointment and bring all the stuff so that you can get you, you, you're very diligent about what you're going to bring to that CPA appointment. All of your bank statements or your what, whatever he asked for, you're going to get most likely. I think, I think a lot of times loan officers will not be as in command, not wanting to upset the client at the, at the front end and really lay out the fact that they are the black belt. I'm here for one reason, my expertise. And so I'm going to guide you through this and for this to be the most effective and painless experience for you, just follow my lead. And I need a complete application to start that. It's some version of that that I think that where some loan officers don't take command of that relationship and position themselves well at the front end because at some point, if a consumer really does want a loan, they're gonna have to do that for somebody. And my position is if you, if you do root yourself in that right out of the gate you do start to develop some like, for this person must know what they're doing. I'm gonna follow this person through because I certainly don't. And the other aspect is letting. Not being afraid to tell the consumer how important that accuracy and completion is to. For what the benefit to the consumer is up front for doing that. If we get this out of the way, I can get more progress on your loan faster as a starting point. And the same thing goes through for documentation requests and things like that that go. Go throughout the process. But I, I think that that's certainly not the only. But I would say that's one of the opportunities for improvement.

Love it.

Craig, I'll tackle the question in front of me. What is the number one reason that loans fall out of the pipeline? Well, I would. When you say fall out of the pipeline, are we presuming that they're going to another lender and closing with somebody else? Are we assuming it's a, it's a borrower that could be closed? I mean, I, I think there, there's some variables around the question, but I think, you know, there are two things that are imperative if you want to be the absolute best originator out there that you can be. One of them is your ability to build relationships and develop a rapport with people. You can't teach that people know when you're genuine, they know when you're not a mechanical bull. They, they know when you are taking the time to learn who's on the other end of the phone or the face to face meeting. And so it's hard to really open up a book, although there are many books on building relationships and what it takes out there. But that's a key component, right? Not relying solely on technology because that doesn't replace the human interaction. The other thing is systems. You have to have good systems and those systems have to be predictable. Our very best people at NFM here are those that do the same thing on every transaction when it comes to the technical aspect. And so when you marry the ability to develop relationships with a system that has a predictability to it, then I think that you, and you, you give yourself the highest certainty of the lowest fallout. Now things are going to happen no matter how well you hit it out of the park and how connected you are to the consumer. All it takes is their brother or cousin saying, I dealt with a lender, you have to use them and you could lose the loan. But if we're talking about hanging onto loans, I think the biggest mistake that people make is assuming their team is going to handle it or the online app is going to handle it. You need those things now, but you also need to never take your eye off the relationship. All. And I think, you know, that's the biggest void between hanging on to a big pipe and having it get frayed.

Well, I'll be honest, the answer here coming in for this poll was lack of inventory. You know, by, by a large margin, I would say with some of the other ones that you guys can see. But I actually want to pivot the conversation going on in the chat. I find that super interesting that people are very active. You got Mike Kush. Actually, this is a question Greg, you should probably just answer on air. Let me ask you this, does NFM try to impact what the team is actually putting out there, what the loan officers are putting out on social media? Because that's one of the assumptions I believe in Mike's first comment and then Another question from Alan you can answer at the same time is, is the influencer division made up of employees who handle social media for all of your mllos?

Okay, so we don't. We're not telling them what to say and do. They're doing it on their own. These are, These are creators, these are artists. You know, they have mastery over both the business and their craft. So we're. We're never telling them what to say. Now, something might happen, the NAR lawsuit might come down. And, and we know that fees are going to potentially be decoupled depending on the approval of the settlement in July. And so what we'll do is we'll arm them with information, right? We'll say, all right, here's a, Here's a cheat sheet for what this means. And then they may go to their socials and put up a post about that with something in the background and stitch it together. But we're never, like, mandating they say something or telling them what to say. And honestly, we don't police it beyond the software that we use, other than to say, don't ever talk about terms, rates, and conditions. Those are the three speed zones you don't want to go flying through. And if you do, there'll be ramifications. And of the tens of thousands, if not millions of posts that we've had, we've never had one infraction, one regulator, one state, no government official come back and say that we've crossed the line in any way. So you kind of have to trust your people. We don't censor anyone. And then in terms of the support people, they all do it on their own. They shoot, they edit, and they. And they are in control of their content and their brand, and they take them very seriously. They take their brands very seriously because they understand that it's the future that it's driving in business. They also understand that if they don't protect their brand, all it takes is one bad experience with the consumer where you say you're going to do something or don't, or you ignore an inquiry just because it's in a state that you're not licensed in. We've got a team behind us that serves all 49 states that we're licensed in. The only state we're not in is New York. And so if Scott Bentley, that mortgage guy who I referenced, is only licensed in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, where we're an east coast company. But a lead, a video goes viral, and a lead comes in from Portland, Oregon, we have a team that gets on it like instantly, like within seconds of them hitting submit on the inquiry form, we're either texting, emailing or calling them. And so that's really imperative to protect the brand. As you're beginning to wrap your head around this idea of, of going direct to consumer in a more intentional way.

Using socials and I would just add to the, to the question specifically, each of your influencers is a licensed loan officer.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

They're not. You don't have, you don't have personalities that are not licensed loan officers that are.

We've never paid a dime to anyone to produce a video on behalf of nfm. It's all been done organically. And the path of least resistance, to address your question about revenue now versus later is to go find people that are doing loans that have been in the business for a minute but that want to hedge their bets, that see where the business is, is going and they want to be able to do both until they master the other. I don't ever envision an environment really where all they're doing is social media. Every one of the influencers we have that has agent business, what they're doing is they're using this know how and this prowess to enter real estate offices and get more connectivity and create more opportunity. And we've got influencers that have, that are closing 30, 40, 50 million a year because of that, because they're able to go in to an office and say, look, we know agents, you're losing market share every day just like we are as originators. Let's band together. Let me show you what I know and let me work patiently with you on showing you how to build a community that you can rely on to generate business.

You know, just to jump in that on for a second because some of our loan officers that have embraced a lot of social media and this consistency of creating content, what I'm calling a micro influencer, what they're really trying to do is extend their personal brand in their local market. Even if that local market is several towns away, it's still social media can be the most effective way for you to extend your reach. And one in particular I think of on our team originally intended to create and this consistency of creating content and what I'm calling a micro influencer, what they're really trying to do is extend their personal brand in their local market. Even if that local market is several towns away, it's still social media can be the most effective way for you to extend your reach and One in particular, I think of on our team originally intended to create that content. And look, you got a time block. You have to change your mindset and your habits of your daily practice to incorporate creating this content. And if you're going to do it consistently and do it well. One of the outcomes of this example was that he created a lot more connections to Realtors through his consumer direct content than he did with consumers. And he is now getting business from those Realtors because he developed a trust and a brand with them. At the same time, he was developing an extension of familiarity and engagement with consumers. And so that was a. An unintended positive consequence. But the point is, you got to be in the game. And so many loan officers are just hesitant to even go there at all for whatever reason. It just, you know, they block themselves from wanting to make that pivot or at least incorporate it as an enhancement to their business growth activities. But let's face it, if you're doing it right, if you're, if you're lucky, somebody you know remembers you, the video you cut a day ago, otherwise it's forgotten anyway.

Yeah.

There's too much other things that we're consuming in our brains that we're moving forward on. So I just encourage, you know, people that even if you're not doing it the way Greg's doing it, which is great, you can still do it as an individual loan officer and affect your business in a very positive way in the near term while you're planting those seeds. Because this is going to be a core competency requirement someday, I believe, in our business as an originator.

Yeah. One of, one of the cool things that I've seen some of your team do, Steve, is, you know, they've gotten themselves comfortable on the platforms and on video and creating content, and they're now becoming this reference point for referral partners, teaching them how to. How to have the same kind of comfort and skill set. And it's just a different way to bring value to your community, to your partners. And, and it's just, you know, it's. It's the mar. It's the modern way.

Right.

That's really what we're talking about. It's recognizing where this cohort of consumers is going to learn, which is what we talked about at the onset, and then being in the best position to be present there and teach others how to do it. I love it.

Yep, Yep. Very effective.

Well, Brian, I'm going to let you tee this question up.

Yeah. So we always hear about Tech Stack, and I Think traditionally we think of tech stack as starting typically at CRM pos Los maybe there's some closing platforms and other stuff in between. But based on the conversation so far, I'd be curious if there's other tools and technologies that you're using either up funnel, whether it's in, in the content creation space, how to manage, you know, how to manage multiple platforms for social media, other other technologies and tools that you're using, you know, beyond the traditionals. And then I have a question around are the this concept of social platforms bleeding into CRM and how they're kind of becoming more interactive? So maybe Steve, we'll just start with you with, with respect to you know, I know you focus a lot on the tech stack in particular at Synergy1 and what are some things you guys are doing there that that helps you differentiate your, your offering to your consumers and your loan officers?

Yeah, I think one of the things that you know again starting from the highest level in the personal finance space and consumer permission data are things that we've all talked about over the last few years and early on in our relationship with Finlocker I had, I had talked to Brian and the rest of the team there about create, you know, taking advantage of the macro moves that with Rocket Money now and Credit Karma have well over 100 million customers online. Zillow's move on the super app that is still in development to some degree but the concept is to create this single point of data that replaces an online bank if you will as where consumers store things and make that not only accessible for the consumer but also actionable. And so we created with FinLocker is our partner created S1 FinFit, which focuses on overall financial fitness as the focal point for consumers that are would be home buyers, could be renters, could be anybody obviously but having a mobile app in their hands where they can budget and they can get access to information and content that makes them more savvy, more educated and therefore more confident in any financial move that they're going to make. We expanded that beyond home readiness and budgeting that in the core platform and also included recently added a partner called Stock Unlock which is a Y Combinator backed company that focuses on stock equity, financial literacy for people. And so again a much more expansive view where again you can get financially confident and learn things along the way so that when you are ready we've got that, that tool available and you know, and now it's, you know it's, it's not, not spiking the football at all because there's more to do. But I think because of it, it's, it's mobile as Greg pointed out. It's, it's on person's phone. It's highly leverageable as we try and scale that in incubating potential clients. The other aspect is just using an intelligence platform with access to data for some life events or some things that come up in people's life, whether it's a credit trigger or a listing that becomes active, using that data for an intentional business purpose and teaching loan officers about what those flashpoints are to engage either an existing client or a new one to be able to convert them into, you know, what, what everybody calls the, an extended value of that client over your career. So you're more likely you bias the more likelihood that they're going to do business with you again because you're approaching them in an intelligent way and in a consistent way in your database. And as these systems become more and more sophisticated, not that they all work in the same way or equally effectively, but it's worth us diving into to begin to learn some of these things so that over time, if we're an early adopter, we can develop this expertise with our loan officers, help them evolve to be most competitive in an environment, no matter what, what that environment looks like and never be outflanked by a rocket or anybody larger because they don't have access to that technology or those types of tools. This is democratized in our access to be able to deploy technology. And we've just taken the position that we wanted to make that available to loan officers so they can create new ways of adding value. As you pointed out earlier, Brian, new ways to add value to both consumer clients as well as referral partners in the industry.

Love it. I got, I got a couple add ons but I want to get Greg's thoughts on, you know, specifically Greg in, in how you're connecting the dots with technology between what one of your creators puts on video and how that, how that receiver of the video. Right. The consumer that's watching the video becomes a lead in your ecosystem. Maybe share a little bit about how you guys have kind of pieced the technology together there.

No, it's an, it's an ongoing process. You can imagine we've been doing this 36 months and we've made every mistake under the sun and continue to.

Because everybody thanks you for your transparency too because you've been super helpful for people to, to learn, you know, you're sharing the, the things that didn't work out well so others can accelerate their growth.

Well, it's a new business is what it is. It's like starting a whole new company and you've got a lot of baptism by fire. And I think what we've. In the, in the beginning when we had the influencers, we didn't know what we didn't know. We had no idea how sticky it would be. So we just took everybody, for instance, who clicked the link off the profile right into a 1003. And we were just amazed that we were able to get, you know, 70% of the people that see a video that click in are filling out these 1003s. But the problem is a large amount of them don't qualify. So we started to do is, we started to bottleneck. We were like, oh my God, this isn't going to work. Look how much time we're spending, you know, gathering all this documentation and we can't focus on the ones that do qualify or can qualify. So we started to really nail down our workflows and I think Finlocker has been instrumental in that. We have an app that we've white labeled through Finlocker called Homestretch. And so a third of the people, what we found statistically, looking at that Data set of 70,000 people that have come in from watching a video and said, you know, I want to get more information or I want help, we found that precisely a third of them are not ready or qualified yet. And so you want to be able to put them into some kind of a system where they can sort of be met, where they are and assessed and nurtured to the point where they're in a position to really take purchasing a home seriously. And so that's been a game changer for us. And then I think on the data side, the things that Dave Savage is doing with the merger of Sales Boomerang and Trust Engine has been good as well. I mean, you, you spoke about, you know, you sort of started to touch on the predict, predictability of when clients are ready. They have a lot of those tells from Sales Boomerang and then they've, they've stacked and layered on top of that through, through a mortgage coach sort of the, the total cost analysis and then some AI to predict. It's sort of an all encompassing thing where whereas, you know, previously Sales Boomerang did what they did with alerts. And so these are people that have already closed and Mortgage Coach focused on just the best way to put an analysis in front of consumers to get to it, to, to elicit a transaction. And so when you put the two together and then overlay it with some AI and some predictability aspects based on life events and things like that. And that's the big thing that's going on right now that I'm hearing because we're going through this process of vetting out CRMs right now. I think that's been pretty well documented through my LinkedIn posts and we're getting towards the end. And one thing that we're not going to look past if we make a move, which our CRM is up at the end of the August, is this predictability aspect. You know, this ability for AI and other data points to be able to see, well, this person's a move up or a move down candidate or they're changing professions. I don't know where they get all the information from, but we've had small samplings that are pretty profound in both CRMs. The other thing that we're doing from a tech standpoint, you know, we don't use Blend. We have our own proprietary POS and that. And that's been very helpful as well to not be sort of controlled by, you know, another entity. There's enough of that going on with, you know, Encompass and some of these other things that you kind of, you know, you kind of have no choice but to succumb to their software. But having our own POS has been helpful. And then also we put a lot of time and effort into creating bilingual 1003s. And so we have a Spanish 1003, we have a Portuguese 1003, we have a Mandarin and a Russian 1003. Small, little, tiny things. But if you are Russian speaking and you know, your English is not perfect, if you're more comfortable filling it out in Russian, you can do that. It will, it will automatically carry over in English and back and forth and you can toggle a little bit there. Not a huge game changer. But in terms of like breaking a barrier and making people feel comfortable and that you care about them and where they're from, it does land pretty nicely. And those are a couple of things. We also, we have, we have made it so that everyone in the organization has to first pull a soft pool, which with our credit arrangement doesn't cost anything. Obviously credit expenses are up exponentially. So the ability to have a soft pool on the front end instead of this inclination and desire by every branch manager, every, hey, let me just get all three bureaus, well, that's a really costly endeavor these days. And so we've kind of rejiggered it so the soft pool goes first. If you think there's something there, move forward. But you know, that helps eliminate half of the excess cost on the credit side. I could go on and on, but I'll stop there.

I love that. Hey Richard, I have one follow up question for Steve. And so Steve going, going to the point of sale specifically and really more specifically to how you are an early adopter, embracer and coach to your team around the importance of digital verification of assets, income and employment. You maybe just share your experience there and how those tools have helped create a better mortgage experience for both your consumers and your loan officers alike.

Yeah, it's a good point because I think in 2018 we introduced consumer opt in to digital verification process, which there were, I'm certain, less than five companies in the country at the time were doing that. And the thought process around that was consumers are already doing, you know, largely doing online banking and other things online. And a lot of hesitancy, as you can imagine, loan officers thinking that their consumers, their clients were not going to do that and had some had struggles adopting a script frankly about how to introduce those things to consumers. But again, largely consumers were already doing these types of things online anyway. So it's getting, catching loan officers up to that new business practice actually. And we had early success with day one certainty. And because of that success we partnered with Fannie Mae. I was on a lot of panels in those days helping Fannie Mae asked me to help other companies get the kind of traction we were seeing. But largely a lot of it was having to, we put it in the consumer's hands where that's very empowering for a consumer when presented the right way. And you combine that with a speed value proposition or a certainty value proposition up front. Over time, believe me, it took a lot of, as you said, coaching, cajoling, whatever you word you want to use, and a lot of took a lot of longer to introduce this concept. But again, adoption over time, just stay at it over time became very, very significant part of our value prop and therefore essentially our manufacturing process. And to get the benefits of those things, you have to think of that changing that process all the way through to completion. And I'll tell you one of the additional things. We were an early adopter of hybrid closings as well. Now I think 82% of our closings are done hybrid. And we decided consciously to not leapfrog hybrid and go to full enotary or ron closings because of the challenges in local municipalities and towns that were not digital or digitized yet. And so I'm glad we did that. And it's been a key part of our value prop that people now expect to have that experience versus that being the outlier. And when you have, you need the whole organization to embrace that to get the full benefit of it. You can't do it as a sidelight and expect to get both the mastering of that process with your employees much less, and being able to explain that process to consumers. So it's taken a lot of work. Again, this is a constant improvement cycle with new technology. And AI, as Greg mentioned, is going to be more and more a component of this. How do we integrate that and make it, you know, that the consumer technically doesn't care about AI unless it benefits them in process or price or something like that. And we have to make that very tangible for them and very real.

Hey, Brian, I'll just piggyback on what Steve just said. You know, I'm with truv, obviously, you can see it right here on my vest. And this is the only plug, I'll say. I mean, what we're seeing with a lot of our lenders that implement Troov, in case you don't know, saving 60, 80% on verifications versus the incumbent, you know, that's verification of employment, income, assets. And so we work with a lot of lenders, but what we've learned is the implementation and specifically how you communicate with the borrower directly impacts the ROI the lender gets from truv. And the experience for the borrower, how many of them actually complete the verification. I mean, it's weird to just send a link without ever talking to the borrower and saying, hey, hey, go verify your employment. Right? It's different if earlier up front in the process, you actually talk to the borrower and you're like, hey, look, we're sending you this, this link with this really cool technology that's going to pull directly from your payroll provider everything you need, and you're not going to have to do it again 10 days before close. You know, this is like a very revolutionary in this, in this business, right? And tell the borrower we're doing this because we're saving you a ton of money on your closing costs, right? These are fees that, that you, we are literally saving you money. It's more secure. There's all these great benefits for it. But if you don't have that conversation up front and you just throw it out of the dark, your conversion's not going to be as good. Right. So in terms of like, how can you use technology to improve the experience? I think you can, you can use your technology to improve the experience just by having those conversations with your borrower. So they're not completely surprised by why you're doing different things. Hey, I'm going to keep driving because we are very short on time. And I got a couple more polls that I want to run and a couple more questions that we want to get. So we're talking about improving the borrower experience through education. And so one of the things you can do, we can do as lenders, and we've talked about this kind of leading up to this call, is to combat certain common myths. I was just looking this up before we did this, we started this webinar and 20% of borrowers think it's impossible to buy a home with a down payment of less than 5%. Now I've got on here you need 20% in your poll that I'm about to launch. But 20% of borrowers think it's impossible with less than 5%. You know, FHA loan requires 3.5%. VA loans have no down payment. And conventional, you can do like 3%. Right. So these are, there are common myths that you can get people, help get people into homes if you can just educate them. Right. So let's, let me, I'm just going to launch this poll and, you know, the audience can participate. Let us know some of those common myths that you, you have the most success, you know, correcting, we'll say. And so while that's going, I'm going to pose this question to, to you guys. Greg, I'll let you go first. What are those myths that you, that you see very, you hear very commonly and maybe it's, maybe the ones that actually have the biggest opportunity are different than the ones that are most common. I'll let you respond.

I think the numbers 1 and 2, they're probably not there by mistake. You know, the credit score, having to have perfect credit and then needing 20% down. I think those are the, you know, the two myths we need Mythbusters. But those, those are the top two that we see most frequently in particular among first time homebuyers.

And Greg, just to piggyback on that, I'm looking at these questions and in my mind that there's an immense amount of content behind each of these questions that a loan officer can turn around and create content on to educate their communities. And I see your team do this regularly. Steve, I see some of your loan officers that do the same thing. And it's taking these myths and then turning them into teaching opportunities. That's one of the powers of social media, in my opinion.

With that question. Yeah, I think more and more consumers are most comfortable being able to not just read it, but also see it. And so as videos become more prevalent, it just, whatever. It's just more believable when they see somebody speaking in a manner in which they can relate to. I know I talked about relatability earlier, but. And there's probably, there are a lot of people out there that are really reticent to step out into social media, which is understandable. You know, where do I begin? How do I do it? What kind of equipment do I need? You know, and being around these incredible artists, which is what I like to call them, creators, whatever. They don't like to be called influencers, by the way. They want to be called creators. Just so, you know, is just to just start the camera, just don't think about it, don't overthink about it, don't worry about your hair or how you look. Nobody gives a shit about that. Honestly, like hit, hit record, start talking about, you know, what I always advise people to do is speak from the soul. Everybody on this call that's in the game is very good at something likely many things. So if you start from a passion place about. So it doesn't require extra thought like, how am I going to create an idea, a new idea? People can tell when you're genuine or not. So I know I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but as, as you and I connected just now, this idea that you've seen content around these things, this is what generates leads. It's stepping out and saying, you know, this is what I know to be true. And if you want more information, contact me here. I think what people really have to wrap their, their hands around is that more and more consumers are most comfortable communicating via video. That's what really lands with them. Right. And so I encourage everybody out there that's trying to generate business to step out, just get out of your comfort zone. Create a hundred, you know, the, the creators I work with say, prepare to fail terribly on your first hundred videos. And then we can assess. You don't need ring lights and all this fancy equipment. All you need is usually just this thing that's a phone, you know, and then just make a video and just hit, hit submit and upload it and let, and let it roll.

Well, I'll, I'll just call out. Samantha has a really good comment that all of the typical search engines, right, they default to 20 when you search for a mortgage calculator or something like that. Right. The default is 20 down which kind of propagates it if you think about it. Right. Steve, you want, you want to jump in here? You got anything you want to add to this?

Probably nothing. Shocking. I would probably align with Craig. I think that, that the Myth of the 20% down, it seems like it comes up the most and I would just dogpile on what Greg was saying is just we talk about this all the time. We have a social media team in house and talk a lot with our loan officers. But just grab the phone and talk and scripting ideas and things like that all help augment along the way just as a starting point to ignite some thought talking. But capturing the key in my mind is capturing consumers. Just it's in your backyard or in your local area is at the point of thought versus the point of action because then is when you start to establish credibility and trust. And if you're breaking down myths as one of those strategies that is going to be very powerful and confidence building for consumers to say even if they've heard it 50 times before, they might hear it that one time that it sinks in to say huh. I'm also thinking about leveling up in life a little bit. Homeownership seems like a good thing I should start thinking about. You just never know and that's why you have to keep taking your swings. And it's never a bad thing to go do, rarely a bad thing to go do and compete in that way.

That's really well said. It's timing. It's like recruiting Steven, you know this because you're very active and, and very successful when it comes to recruiting and building your incredible company. Like you could call somebody and, and you might be able to get them over to your place because timing is so wonderful in three weeks or it might take five years or 10 years. You, you just have to keep doing, going through the process consistently and that is what's going to yield the best results.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brian, I think in the interest of time we should skip the next question if you don't mind. Let's jump into that, that next poll. I'm going to launch it right now. And this is really where, where your most effective channels for lead generation. You've got Greg on here talking about killing it essentially with you know, social media, you know, 70, 000 leads in three in a three year period. Since you've started this, we won't call it influencer division, we'll call it a creator division.

Creator collective.

Creator collective, yeah, yeah, we rebranded it.

To the Creator collective.

Yeah. And so, you know, I'd ask folks, you can write something in if it's not on here, but let's find out. Give other people, let other people know where should, where are they dropping the ball or where should they be focusing? And you know, while that's going, Greg, you know, I mean, you, you talked about social media. Why don't you just give a breakdown of what, which social media outlets? I mean, I think a lot of loan officers doing it probably know, but the ones that aren't doing it probably don't know.

TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reels, Facebook, that I mentioned already, those are the main drivers. So all the usual suspects. But we find that the platform that yields the most amount of leads is Tick Tock. We also find statistically that the ones that convert best are Instagram, interestingly enough.

Interesting. That's interesting. Well, I'm going to share the poll results. It's a smaller, you know, audience that's, that's submitting right now. We got a lot of folks in the audience, but love to get a couple more of you guys to chime in, but it looks like referrals are winning right now. I'm literally influencing the poll results as we speak. Steve, you got anything you want to add to this? Does it surprise you? I'll just share right now. Does it surprise you that referrals are coming into the top?

No, it's. That has been the lifeblood of our loan officers in establishing relationships and credibility in the marketplace. Because, you know, let's face it, whether it's a, you know, somebody that lives down the street from you or a professional realtor in your market, they're not going to continue to refer someone that they're not having a long term success with. It hurts their own personal, it's not in their best interest to do so. And so it is probably the single most area that most of our loan officers spend their time with and on both developing and retaining those well established referral sources. But I think that the opportunity lies in some of these other areas that are not showing up here in the polls, but also in social media. These are present and immediate opportunities for loan officers to, to extend their reach. And I think it's going to be again, happening in real time that one of the most effective that is going to pay pay dividends over time.

Cool. We're going to get to our last question here and end this webinar just in time. But Brian, you want to tee this one up? Go ahead.

So, I mean, I think we, we've talked a lot about this already. In terms of the speed round, I'll start with you, Greg. What's, what's like the number one topic, if you want to call it that, that, that you're seeing your team have success from an education perspective, or is there one topic now I'm going to.

Repurpose this and perfect. Because, because I've talked about already how we're getting to consumers. I'm going to tell you what I envision and where I'd love to see the industry go. By and large, when a consumer comes in to our CRMs industry wide, we don't identify their age, where they are in their journey. Are they a first time homebuyer? And the reason that's important is because it's critical at that juncture to I think be able to identify who they are. If it's a 26 year old Gen Z or first time homebuyer, my belief and desire is that the CRM recognizes that and then we have an entire workflow path to address that consumer so that, you know, in that way it'll be stickier. I mean the fact that as an industry we address a 26 year old first time homebuyer with the same paperwork, the same collateral, the same appearance as we do a 55 year old that might be purchasing a home for the fifth time, to me it's a big miss. I know we're all busy, but that's a target that, that I have in front of me that I want to challenge my team to build out. And I would encourage every mortgage company to start to think about that.

I like that. Steve, any closing thoughts around the successfully educating borrowers today?

I will tell you because it's the largest, the first time homebuyer, the millennial market, and the focus there about educate. If you're an originator and you just take your originator mindset out and put it aside for a second and put your educator hat on and just think like an educator and what you would produce and what would you focus on there in varying ways of doing that. I see originators at our company all the time that are most successful in converting those types of relationships or new or old into transactions and into their database, their circle of trust, if you will. That's where that's going to be the highest paying dividend and as well as educating your longtime Realtor partners. If you are a source of education that makes them smarter, you're going to win those relationships and you're going to retain those relationships.

Love it. Richard, this was gold, man. Thank you for organizing. I learned a ton here.

I have two Greg, Steve, Brian, thank you guys so much for joining us today and everybody for joining in the audience.

You guys are awesome. Thanks a lot.

Glad to be with you. Thank you. Have a great day. See you, Steve.

Thanks, everybody.

Yep.

See you.

Greg.

On.