Brokers (Broker Owners): What You Can Do to Support Your Agents and Be More Efficient

Broker owners: well it couldn’t be more obvious that the better your agents perform, the better you do overall. Every brokerage has its higher-producing agents that are a sure bet for closed deals each and every month, put the often-asked question remains: how can you get all - not just some - agents to produce more, good business that closes?

To drill down and look at how this can be achieved means first looking at the reasons that some agents continually struggle to close deals. Some agents follow a simple philosophy: more applications = more business, but this is often not the case. Better qualified and underwritten applications mean more business. Business isn’t business until the deal closes!

Grabbing as many apps as you can just to try to increase the probability of more closed deals can actually be counter-productive. In fact, we often come across broker owners who indicate that one of the greatest sources of frustration is in fact incomplete and poorly underwritten applications.

The challenge here is that you may see a bigger picture that your agents may not:

·         Low closure rates damage relationships with lenders.

·         Applications that are poorly underwritten and have undisclosed information damage and frustrate relationships with lenders.

·         The time wasted on a deal that fails to close could have meant several good deals had the agent’s time been allocated to driving in new business vs. working deals that may not happen.

As a mortgage brokerage owner your agents are largely independent and so the best way to support your agents to be more efficient is to invest in educating them and giving them access to the tools that they will need to do a better job – whether you are there to hold their hand or not.

Determining where this investment should be made boils down to looking at the common reasons why deals don’t make it from the application stage to the point of funding.

Un/mis-disclosed information continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing agents and brokers today. Most consumers fail to disclose or mis-disclose information by omission (they didn’t know something was relevant) or because they simply didn’t know/forgot. Sometimes this non-disclosure is less innocent. Often third parties refer business and the information the third party provides is not totally correct. This could relate to a property’s value, who is on title to a property, or even equity in a property.

Often issues will not surface until after a deal has been submitted to a lender, or worse, until it is with the lawyer pending closing.

Your agents access credit reports because many lenders approve and fund mortgage financing based on the state of a customer’s credit. Your agents review a customer’s credit because they know that the lender will too and there is no point in submitting a deal that doesn’t qualify.

Many lenders now use AVMs (Automated Valuation Model) and Property Reports to estimate a property’s value, calculate equity information based on the registered mortgages on title and utilize other pertinent information such as ownership – an AVM and corresponding Property Report is almost like running a credit report, but on the property. Many broker owners have caught on that, like a credit report, requesting an AVM & Property Report at the application stage is your agent’s first line of defence against working on a deal that is unlikely to close due to not having the whole picture.

Most AVMs and Property Reports are available online and are an inexpensive way to offer your brokers access to a tool that will lead to more efficiency and a better producing brokerage.

For more information on the tools that will help you increase productivity and help your agents close more deals please contact Purview For Mortgage Brokers today by calling 1.855.787.8439.