Title: Returning to a New Sales Market

How mortgage origination professionals can pivot their marketing strategies from a refinance market to a purchase market.

With the expected continued rise of mortgage rates to around 3.7%, the refinance market is already slowing down due to a lack of demand. In its wake, lenders can rely on the new purchase market to support continued growth through the remainder of 2021 and beyond.

Let’s be clear: We aren’t heading into a purchase market. We are already in a purchase market, leaving many loan originators feeling as if they are behind the eightball when attempting to re-apply the appropriate disciplines and support for their teams to meet the needs of this more traditional market.

Luckily, lenders who worked with their mortgage software service providers to capitalize on automated communication systems during the refinance boom and pandemic will find the pivot to a purchase market much easier than those who did not.

Where previous buyer markets required lenders to be fast when communicating with their prospective borrowers, this new buyer market requires loan officers to respond to their leads at warp speed while delivering a personalized omnichannel marketing experience for every lead.

As we saw with the refinance market, the lenders that were quick to send educational material to their leads were the ones that saw the highest return on their marketing efforts. The same applies to the purchase market with an added factor of haste.

Employing humanized automation is also an essential step for succeeding in the new purchase market. In other words, when using automation in the mortgage industry, it’s vital to deliver a custom human interaction borrowers are craving. For example, when deploying automated texting features, your message needs to feel conversational to the borrower.

Be the first to respond to the lead, and you’ll increase your chance of converting them into a customer by 238%. Powerful mortgage automation engines allow loan officers to set up rules-based workflows that instantly reply to borrowers, minimizing lost business to your faster competitors.

If you use video messaging, your customers expect an experience customized to their situation, and you need to portray yourself as trustworthy. A mortgage marketing CRM like Surefire allows you to create and launch video messages right inside the platform with Power Video. With personalization in mind, you can easily make short video snippets and send them directly to borrowers or post them across several social media platforms at the same time.

If you send an email, recipients will expect personalization. Remember clients on their birthdays and holidays, or simply automate communications with a mortgage CRM software. In studies conducted by Top of Mind on their mortgage clients, birthday and holiday communications consistently ranked in the top 10 marketing deployments that triggered an engagement with prospective borrowers and led to an eventual application.

This new market is competitive. In some of the hottest markets, borrowers have one weekend to find their desired home and engage in a multi-bid process. The best mortgage originators ensure that their customers are going into this environment prepared to win.

The more you invest in educating and making your prospects and borrowers feel special, the greater the opportunity to earn current business and future referrals. Even if they aren’t ready to complete the purchase now, automated educational materials on repairing credit or optional loan programs will still assist lenders in securing a long-term client base without sacrificing the origination loans in their current pipeline.

A mortgage marketing automation platform like Surefire can handle the heavy lifting for loan originators. Surefire helps uncover additional loan opportunities, automatically sends personalized marketing to leads and past clients, and helps lenders cast a wider net to drive deeper engagement with homebuyers across text, video, social, email, and print.

We want to be a part of your success in a purchase market, so schedule a demo with us today!