Loan officers had a quite roller coaster ride over the last few years due to factors that disrupted the global economy. Post-pandemic, mortgage loan originators started to capitalize on refinancing demands. It was their chance to compensate for the economic losses brought about by the Covid 19 pandemic.
Cut to 2022 and inflation is here. The Federal Reserve announced a 75-basis point interest rate hike to tame inflation. It resulted in a subsequent dip in mortgage loan demand. Profit prospects of lending institutions took a direct hit because of a dipping loan demand.
This made the situation extremely difficult for loan officers. For them, it is either to originate more loans or go home. Banking institutions like JP Morgan Chase made this intention pretty clear as they laid off over 1000 employees this year. A sharp decline in homebuying prospects impacted the profit margins of this institution. This led them to downsize their employee strength and compensate for the losses.
The path ahead is quite challenging for loan officers of small, medium, and large lending institutions. They simply cannot afford to waste time on administrative tasks. Such tasks include maintaining liaison with real estate agents, lenders, loan processors, and borrowers. Rather, they must give more time to identifying and proactively reaching out to high-value mortgage prospects such as home equity value holders.
This is the time when virtual assistants come into play. Loan officers need to offload all the mundane yet critical tasks to virtual assistants to prevent burnout.
Tasks that a Mortgage Virtual Assistant Can Do
Here’s a lowdown of the tasks that a mortgage virtual assistant can do for loan officers.
General Office Work
- Proactive and frictionless communication with mortgage prospects, lenders, loan processors, and real estate agents
- Liaison with underwriters and other third-party stakeholders for loans and requests from lenders
- Document management assistance that involves indexing and filing loan documents
- CRM and Database management
- Educating clients on mortgage knowledge
Client Support
- Manage escrow accounts
- Prepare critical mortgage-related documents
- Review and flag document errors
- Receive and disburse requests
- Open new borrower accounts
- Appraisal ordering
Managing Calendars
- Maintain and schedule important training sessions and meetings
- Schedule and track daily appointment schedules with leads
Increasing Productivity
- Files processing for underwriting
- Uploading underwriting conditions
- Email correspondence daily
How Does a Virtual Assistant Unburden Loan Officers from Routine Tasks?
Time is money. In the current state of the mortgage industry, a loan officer cannot afford to spend time on administrative tasks. This will be equivalent to losing several hundred dollars in just a second. Therefore, loan officers must rely on virtual assistants. They get all the administrative tasks done within minimal time and intervention.
Connecting with Real Estate Agents
Real estate agents are abundant. Any high-profile real estate convention can get a loan officer multiple agent contacts. The real deal starts from shortlisting to connecting with the real estate agent for a good business referral for lenders. It involves the elaborate work of entering all the contact details in an excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet has to be formatted as per the individual loan officer’s CRM requirements.
A virtual assistant sitting miles away gets this job done within a much lesser ETA and cost.
A loan officer does not always have the bandwidth to research and find real estate agents who match the former’s requirements. In such cases, a virtual assistant taps into social media platforms and search engines to find the best-suited agents and their activity in the area targeted by the loan officer. This will facilitate a filtered list of real estate agents whom the loan officers can connect with.
Filtering Out Contact Info
There are chances that the list of mortgage prospect leads may have incomplete or wrong contact information. This situation applies to loan officers who reach out to prospects personally.
In such cases, virtual assistance is an answer. They make discretion between new leads and the DNC list to find out the missing contact information. A loan officer can export the leads with bad contact info in a separate column in a spreadsheet. The virtual assistant can be allowed access to the spreadsheet that is limited to this column. After getting access, the assistant uses specific tools to find the correct and complete contact information over the Internet. They compile the contact in a list and roll it out to the loan officer for a follow-up campaign.
This is an additional effort along with direct mailers to reach out to as many leads as possible. It is essential to improve the prospects of increasing the lenders’ funding rate.
A Mortgage Bankers’ Association contact study’s Lead Vendor Analysis Report findings stated that better engagement strategies and platforms enabled lenders to boost their funding rate from 1.82% to 5.60%.
Creating Marketing Collaterals
Most homebuyers take to the Internet to search for their preferred lenders. Therefore, digital marketing collaterals are a great way for loan officers to help their lending institutions stay at the forefront of mortgage loan prospects.
But should loan officers invest time in writing blogs and newsletters? The answer is an absolute no. Moreover, there needs to be a streamlined marketing strategy to allow the collaterals to grab as many eyeballs as they can. These tasks are way beyond a loan officer’s skills.
A mortgage virtual assistant has the necessary domain expertise. They stay on top of trends and factors that disrupt the mortgage industry. Virtual assistants stay aware of every factor that creates a difference in loan processing activities. They combine these virtues with laser-sharp marketing activities to write and market content collaterals. These marketing content collaterals fetch maximum traction and hence bring leads for a loan officer.
Developing Drip Campaigns
Developing Drip Campaigns A drip campaign is another go-to strategy for loan officers to nurture their leads and turn them into prospects. These campaigns are a combination of relevant mortgage industry information and expert recommendations. Such aspects also make a drip campaign a great strategy to convert previous prospects into returning customers.
According to an MPAMAG article, the cost of acquiring a new lead is 5 times higher than retaining a previous customer.
A virtual assistant has the right kind of expertise to provide information most effectively while utilizing minimum real estate. Their drip email campaigns present valuable content that projects loan officers’ ability to meet customers’ needs sans any hard-selling attempts. They segment and personalize emails to suit the specific preferences of customers.
Managing CRM
It is absolutely critical for loan officers to update their CRM database from time to time. It is key to facilitating the free flow of information at every touchpoint in a loan processing life cycle.
Virtual assistants will segment your database contacts and their pertinent details based on a loan officer’s requirements. They can also create unique campaigns for those accounts based on the notes updated by the loan officer.
How Do We Assist You with a Virtual Assistance Support Cut Out Just for Your Needs?
As a prominent mortgage virtual assistance service provider, we have curated a service package that unloads loan officers from their daily pipelines of routine tasks.
You get to choose among our talent pool of mortgage virtual assistants based on your requirements. Our experts follow a well-defined process while catering to your requirements. They identify all the repetitive tasks and create a document of them. Post that, they run a thorough check-up of your mode of operation. They use this observation to work hand-in-hand with you. Our team of remote assistants will keep your communication channel active with your prospects in the following ways:
- Proactive communication about their loan application status.
- Relay information about various mortgage products through multiple communication channels.
- Follow up with mortgage prospects from marketing lists.
Our team of industry expert virtual assistants provides all-around support throughout the loan processing stage. They create an application and enter all the details in the 1003 form in the LOS. Virtual assistants play an integral part in liaison with borrowers to obtain all the key documents required during processing a loan application.
They schedule, reorganize meetings and track those sessions with new and existing mortgage leads. Virtual assistants make a note of all the minutes of meetings or conduct audio transcription of meetings. This allows loan officers to stay on top of the progress made with each lead.
Who We Are and What Makes Us an Expert?
This article is authored by professionals at Expert Mortgage Assistance, the No.1 mortgage virtual assistance support provider. We are home to virtual assistance experts whom you can avail yourself of on a pay-as-you-go payment model.
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