With mortgage rates doubled over the last year, acquiring and retaining customers has become more challenging than it already is. Home buyers shop around with different lenders and look into partnering with loan officers that could give them the best offer.
Clearly, the volatile financial market has been a major frustration among consumers. Not to mention, the inefficient and incompetent process in the mortgage industry.
As a loan officer, what can you do to reduce or eliminate these frustrations? How can you speed up the process and ensure your customers get their files to closing?
It Requires One Radical Change in the Way You Run Your Business
Pre-approvals are a powerful tool. They’re a strong indicator that your customer is dead-serious in getting that loan. Statistics show that a huge percentage of those who got a pre-approval ended up getting a loan from a lender who pre-approved them.
In a consumer’s perspective, a pre-approval helps them speed up the home buying process. It secures them for a home loan that fits their budget.
However, pre-approvals can also go wrong and are not expressly set in stone. When a customer’s credit or other set of circumstances change, so will their odds of actually being approved for that loan type. You need a more dynamic pre-approval process to improve your customer retention and reduce fall-out.
Checking all these critical points could eat up a lot of your time and money depending on what support and resources you do or don't surround yourself with. And while AI pre-approvals exist and make the pre-approval process much faster, the AI-generated pre-approvals aren’t always guaranteed to be accurate, as they are mostly driven only by a workflow of questions. Sometimes, it can only add up to the frustration of the customers.
This is even more true when your customers are in unique situations and require out-of-the-box solutions. In which case, no wizard or AI can provide the perfect loan option for your customer. Most typical LOAs aren't so well versed in different lender products and policies, too. Plus, they are often costly and only add friction in the process.
So what’s better than a pre-approval?
Simple.
Pre-underwriting.
Don’t get us wrong. A pre-approval is an essential tool. But serious home buyers may require one step further than being pre-approved.
In pre-underwriting, your customer’s financials are vetted thoroughly to set them up with a specific loan amount that they’d qualify for. When home buyers submit an offer to their desired home, they’re already cleared any conditions that lenders may have.
True, the pre-underwriting is a more intensive process. But with the rising interest rates and to ensure your customer gets to qualify for a loan product despite their unique circumstances, pre-underwriting proves to be even more critical.
In pre-underwriting, the underwriters will perform the same due diligence on your customers’ documents as they would during underwriting of the actual loan.
When your customer acquires a pre-underwritten approval, the length of time to get to CTC can be reduced significantly. This is accomplished by identifying and obtaining all or most-all of the Approval Conditions at the front end of the process.
Pre-underwriting is one of EquippedLO’s specialty. With our in-house underwriters, we perform thorough assessment to ensure your customer gets the best loan option.
Even in unique financial situations and tricky loan scenarios, we go above and beyond to find the solution for your customer and present counter offers that they’d qualify for.
Our industry-trained staff will look at your customers’:
- Credit history
- Assets
- Employment history
- Ability to Repay
- Proof of identity
- Cross-reference your desired lender product with others to ensure your customer is in the best place to succeed.
- True Debt-to-Income Ratio Verification
We present the evaluation report beautifully, presenting you and your customer only the essential information needed. Oh, and it's branded in any way you wish in case you plan on using this new resource to win more real estate partners. Let them know you are backed by unrivaled support which improves your mutual clients' experience!