Bob Williamson

Are You Ready for the 2nd Quarter of 2010?

coachbob505@msn.com — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:35:00 GMT

What will the real estate (and mortgage) markets look like after the Fed ends its program of buying mortgage-backed securities in March, and the homebuyer tax credit expires in April? I’m not alone in expecting that rates will rise, perhaps significantly, and that we will see a flattening of home sales similar to that experienced by the auto industry after the “Cash for Clunkers” program ended. (This is what happens when you create artificial incentives for people to buy – you squeeze the demand into the window of opportunity you’ve created so that everyone who is serious about buying does so before the deadline, but these kinds of gimmicks do not usually increase the overall demand.)

We can also expect a new wave of foreclosures to dump more inventory on the market, and the result of all this will be further downward pressure on home values and prices.

In short, 2010 will not be without opportunities, but those opportunities will be taken by originators who have a clear-eyed view what the world will look like in a few months (what in many ways it already looks like), and who have prepared themselves to be far more visible than their competition in what promises to be a shrinking market.

I’ve had a lot of feedback from loan officers who would like to get coaching so they can close more loans, but they are on tight budget right now because they’re not originating enough loans. It's a vicious circle.

So I’ve decided to offer 8 weeks of GROUP coaching, with class sizes of no more than 12 people. The 8 weeks of group coaching will focus on increasing the quantity and quality of your lead generation, and on converting a higher percentage of those leads into fundable loan transactions. We will be concentrating on purchase market opportunities, and participants will also receive a downloadable manual, and marketing materials that you can customize and use in your local market.

The tuition for the full 8 weeks is $200. If you are interested, you can get more information here.

What’s Wrong with Your Marketing?

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:06:00 GMT

Do you ever find yourself wondering, "What's wrong with my marketing & lead generation?"

Generally, marketing systems that don't generate many leads or convert them into loans suffer from a few common mistakes. If you sign up for this zero-cost online clinic (see below), I'll critique as many lead generation and marketing ideas as I can get to in 60 minutes. You will come away from the hour with ways to improve your lead generation and marketing, and you’ll also get new ideas from other participants!

Marketing Mistake #1: Poor Targeting

Who are you trying to reach with your marketing piece?

If you haven’t carefully considered that question before you plan a marketing or lead generation campaign, you won’t have a clear idea of how to reach them or what to say to them.

For example, it’s not enough to say you’re targeting “people who want to buy a home.” First-time buyers have different needs, different questions, different problems and different priorities than move-up buyers or investors, for example.

The more narrowly you define your target market for a campaign or program, the easier it usually is to figure out a way to reach them. If you’re targeting first-time buyers, are you looking for people who live in a certain part of town? Do you want apartment-dwellers, people renting houses, or people living in their parents’ basement?

Do you want to reach newlyweds, or single professionals?

Do you want to target teachers or people who work at the factory down the street?

If you carefully target and segment your market, not only does that make it easier to figure out the best way to reach them, but it also makes it much easier for you to design your campaign/piece so that it speaks directly to them, in their language, about the fears/problems/desires that are unique to them.

And that makes a huge difference in your results.

Marketing Mistake #2: Ineffective Marketing Piece

The potential client to your marketing program wants to know: "Is this Ad/Email/Mail Piece/Website going to solve my problem or get me to my goal?" They're not willing to spend 5 minutes to find out.

Does your headline instantly grab their attention by focusing them on something they really want, or something they really want to avoid? Whatever it is, are you clearly showing your potential client that they're in the right place to get it? Just like a bloodhound, your potential clients are on a mission. And they are willing to follow the trail as long as they can still smell it.

Too often, the scent trail stops as soon as the prospect sees your headline, or the first paragraph.

Marketing Mistake #3: No Clear CTA

As in "Call to Action."

Every marketing program must be designed to accomplish one primary task. Not two. Not six. Just one.

But what should that one CTA be? To answer that, you must build a bridge from your potential client to the ultimate conversion and decide what's possible in a brief, first encounter.

Start with your potential client. Answer the following questions:

1. What is their itch/pain/problem/desire?
2. What do they want/expect from you?
3. What's the most risk they're willing to take in this first encounter?

Then put together an offer, and a clear call to action that moves them from skeptical stranger to some place that makes sense along the sales process.

If you were selling paper clips, you could probably just ask for the sale.

But you're selling mortgage loans, so you will never close the deal with that first piece. In that case, can you generate a request for a Prequal? Or is that too much? Maybe you need to provide a free report with a solution to a problem they're having before they trust you enough to tell you anything about their needs.

Free Webinar: Lead Generation & Marketing Clinic

If you want to see specific examples of how this all works, you're invited to attend the Lead Generation & Marketing Online Clinic on Tuesday, October 27 at 2:00 pm Eastern time (11:00 am Pacific).

If you register now, you could receive a critique of one of your marketing programs.

Even if you don’t have a marketing program you need feedback on, there's plenty to be learned by sitting quietly and letting other people take the heat. J

Can't make the live call? You can still sign up below and watch the replay later.

Whistling Past the Mortgage Graveyard: How Loan Originators Can Take a Reality-Based Strategic Approach to the Next 12 Months

coachbob505@msn.com — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:30:00 GMT

What is “whistling past the graveyard”? According to Wiktionary, it’s an idiomatic American expression, meaning: To attempt to stay cheerful in a dire situation; To proceed with a task, ignoring an upcoming hazard, hoping for a good outcome.

All of us who make our living in the mortgage industry want the housing market and the economy to recover. The fact that loan volume has shrunk from $3 trillion in 2005 to a projected $1 trillion this year is reason enough for that desire.

But it’s one thing to hope for the best while keeping our feet grounded in reality, and another thing to believe the worst is over when the facts say something quite different. Case in point:

According to the National Association of Realtors®, contract activity for pending home sales has risen for six straight months, which some point to a sure sign the housing market is in recovery.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says the housing market momentum has clearly turned for the better. “The recovery is broad-based across many parts of the country. Housing affordability has been at record highs this year with the added stimulus of a first-time buyer tax credit,” he said.

Mr. Yun’s job as the chief economist for the NAR is to present the rosiest possible scenario in order to encourage the public to buy and sell homes. If you look back at his analyses and predictions over the past 4 years, you would have to give him credit for taking his job very seriously.

Unfortunately, he has been consistently wrong, claiming at first that the housing bubble was just a short-term anomaly, and then retreating for the last couple of years to the position that the proverbial “spring” was just around the corner. Now he’s saying the market has recovered, when in actuality, the picture is not nearly that pretty. If you look more closely at the numbers, the Pending Home Sales Index in the Northeast and the Midwest regions of the country actually declined in July. The numbers only improved in the South (up 3.1 percent, and in the West (up 12.1 percent). The big jump in pending sales in the West basically carried the country’s numbers. And what’s going on in the West? The last time I saw numbers for California, for example, the vast majority -- more than 80% -- of all residential real estate sales were foreclosure auctions, REO sales, and short sales.

A nationwide survey of 1,500 real-estate agents, conducted in June and sponsored by the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance found that only 36% of all sales involve "non-distressed" properties.

Of the non-distressed sales, only 31% of those were what the survey described as "unforced or optional." The rest were sales by homeowners in some kind of financial or personal crisis.

Let’s do the math and see what those numbers are telling us. Assume a hypothetical market with 1,000 home sales, for the sake of simplicity. 640 of those sales were “distressed sales”: foreclosures, REOs, and short sales. That leaves 360 homes that were “non-distressed”. But hold on a minute. The survey indicates that of those 360 home sales, 248 were sales by homeowners “in some kind of financial or personal crisis.” So of the 1,000 sales in our hypothetical housing market, 888 of them were made under some kind of duress.

The Wall St. Journal (Improving Home Sales Belie Market Reality, August 21, 2009) quoted John Mauldin of Millennium Wave Advisors, who wrote, in response to this survey: "Think about that for a minute. Two-thirds of home sales are either foreclosures or banks taking a loss on the mortgage. And only a third of the remaining one-third -- roughly 10% of overall sales -- comes from something we could call a ‘normal selling process’."

There is no question that the government’s taxpayer funded first-time buyer credit has stimulated sales to people who are in a position to buy, and who have been motivated to buy now because of the November 30^th deadline. The NAR expects a flurry of sales in the next few months, and they’re probably right about that. One real estate agent in California called it a “feeding frenzy at the lower end of the market”.

The same thing happened with the “Cash for Clunkers” program. When you create a financial incentive to buy now, and an artificial deadline, anybody who eventually would have bought will buy before the deadline. The car dealers will have a good third quarter thanks to “Cash for Clunkers”. But they now realize that their next two quarters are likely to be disasters of historical proportions.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported a couple of weeks ago that the number of homeowners behind on their mortgage payments hit a new high during the second quarter, with more than one in eight homeowners (13.2%) either delinquent or in the foreclosure process. And Jay Brinkmann, chief economist at the MBA, said foreclosures weren't expected to peak until later in 2010.

So housing inventories are likely to continue to be fattened by foreclosure auctions and REO properties being dumped on the market, and continuing to compete with normal sellers trying to market their homes, and putting further downward pressure on home prices.

In July of 2008, sales of existing homes hit a five-month high, leading the NAR to openly hope a sustained upturn was coming.

They were wrong. Today, home sales are pretty much where they were last year. Given the level of consumer confidence (low) and the rise in unemployment and foreclosures, they will likely still be at this point this time next year.

What Should Your Loan Origination Strategy Be for the Next 12 Months?

In most markets across the country, expect the action to continue to be in distressed properties. Expect the buyers of those properties to be investors and first-time buyers who recognize that this is a unique opportunity to buy homes today at bargain prices – homes that will return to more normal values when the housing market eventually regains its equilibrium – thus creating “instant” equity once that happens.

If you’re in a market that has not been as heavily impacted by foreclosures and the like, you may see less investor activity, and a higher proportion of first-time buyers. You can also look for move-up buyers who see an opportunity to sell their home, and make a very good deal, relatively speaking, on a property in a higher price range. These move-up buyers will understand that the sale of their current home and the purchase of their subsequent home should be viewed as a unified strategy. In other words, they will understand that they can’t expect, in this market, to get top dollar on the home they’re selling, but that they can more than make up for what they may be losing on that sale when they buy their next home – because, as a buyer in a market segment with lots of inventory and not many buyers, they will be in a very strong negotiating position, with lots to choose from and little competition from other buyers.

Assuming you don’t already know, how do you find out which description best fits your market dynamics?

· Interview real estate agents. Do you need an excuse to talk to more agents? Are you looking for a way to get into substantive conversations that don’t begin and end with, “Please, sir, do you have a deal for me?” Then talk to agents every week, and ask them about their listings, about any recent sales. Find out whether they were “normal” transactions (a totally willing but not desperate seller and a buyer willing to pay something close to asking price), or whether they were distressed in some way. Ask them how many REO properties they would guess are on the market in your area, and whether those REOs are even publicly listed in the MLS. The more agents you talk to, the better feel you’ll get for where your market is.

· Go to open houses and broker opens. Get familiar with the inventory in your market, and while you’re at it, interview the agents you meet (see the previous bullet-point).

· Find a knowledgeable and experienced agent in your area and ask him or her to share with you the monthly MLS statistics on total listings, and the total number of sales in the last month, as well as the average or median price the homes sold for. Start keeping track of this data. It’s like an EKG of the health of your local market. Divide the total number of units sold last month by the current number of listings for sale. As a rule of thumb, if that ratio is higher than 30%, your market is probably relatively healthy – it suggests that most of the people who want to sell their homes are able to do so in about 90 days. If the percentage of available listings sold each month is 30% or less, that indicates a strong buyer’s market, and the lower the percentage, the stronger the buyer’s negotiating advantage and the greater the downward pressure on prices and values.

· It also wouldn’t hurt to get your real estate license and join your local Board of Realtors so you can have direct access to the MLS and its reports on your real estate market.

If you’re familiar with my work, you know I’ve been on a one-man mission for years to help loan originators become more knowledgeable about their local real estate markets, and to position themselves as homebuyer coaches who teach their buyer clients how to benefit from the unique dynamics of this housing market.

If you can reposition yourself in that way, you will have an insurmountable advantage over your competition, because you will be able to prove to your prospects that you save your clients far more money on the purchase (and the financing) of a home than any other lender. You will easily double your current rate of lead conversion (which means you’ll close more loans even if you don’t generate more leads).

Your buyers will be more confident and decisive, which means that when you refer them to one of your Realtor partners, they will have more realistic expectations about what they want and will be more self-assured about making offers – resulting in a quicker transaction for the Realtor than if the buyers had simply gotten prequalified or preapproved with another lender. The shorter selling cycle for your agents means they will be able to work with more buyers and close more transactions.

If you can see how this strategy could help you find and close more purchase transactions in today’s market, you may want to attend my new, free online seminar on Tuesday, September 22^nd. Click here for the link to the registration page.

Change or Die: Do You Feel Lucky? 7 Critical Skills for the 21st Century Mortgage Professional

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:23:00 GMT

Suppose your doctor told you that if you didn’t change your lifestyle, you would die in six months. What would you do?

Most people think they would make the necessary changes, but they would be wrong. The medical profession has done the studies, multiple times, and what they’ve found is that people in this situation will try to change their habits but, within 2 years, 90% of them slip back into their old ways.

If this is true of people facing the prospect of death, what does it say about your chances of making substantive changes if the only thing at risk is your income level?

What if you know that the way you approach marketing yourself and managing your loan origination business is taking you in the wrong direction?

In other words, if you know that you’ve got to make changes in your work habits, or risk declining income, how do you get yourself to change those habits when 9 out of 10 people who are faced with the much more serious threat of dying can’t make changes to save their own lives?

The odds are 9 to 1 against you. As Dirty Harry might say, “Do you feel that lucky?”

There is a way to motivate yourself to change old, unproductive work habits and behaviors. But it has nothing to do with luck or “will power”.

In a 2005 article in Fast Company magazine, Alan Deutschman reported on studies of patients suffering from heart disease caused by lifestyle choices like smoking, poor diet, being overweight, and lack of exercise. The studies all showed that when told that they would die if they didn’t change these behaviors, most people got “scared straight”, and resolved to do better. But within 2 years, 90% of them had returned to their old unhealthy lifestyles.

The point: Fear does not work well as a motivator over the long term.

Deutschman also wrote in the same article about the work of Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research institute in Sausalito. Ornish developed a holistic approach to treating heart disease patients that involved the use of a low-fat vegetarian diet, smoking cessation classes, a support group led by a psychologist, and instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise training. He published peer review studies showing that this approach could reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. But the medical establishment was understandably skeptical that people would be able to sustain these lifestyle changes. So Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial on 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. Three years later, 77% of these patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes. As a result, they did not need expensive bypass surgery or angioplasty procedures (and Mutual of Omaha saved about $30,000 per patient).

Why did these people overwhelmingly succeed in making momentous changes in their habits of daily living – the kinds of changes most of us would regard as requiring significant amounts of discipline and will power?

What makes the success of the patients in the Ornish study even more amazing is that the heart patients in the traditional medical studies – the ones in which there was a 90% failure rate – merely had to take their prescription medication every day and avoid certain foods known to clog arteries. The commitment was far less rigorous than the one Ornish required of his patients – and yet 9 out of 10 of them failed to do it, knowing that their failure could very likely kill them.

Ornish’s theory was that people who smoke or overeat and don’t exercise are doing so as a way of coping with their emotional problems. So the prospect of giving up these distractions was unappealing. As he put it, “Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they’re going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating. Who wants to live longer when you’re in chronic emotional pain?” He added, “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.”

Ornish also believes that dramatic, comprehensive changes are easier for people to sustain than small, incremental ones. His radical program produced quick, impressive results, with patients reporting a 91% decrease in the frequency of chest pain in the first month. He explained, “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator. When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all these things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’”

How Can We Apply This to Your Business Life?

There are two important ideas here that have significant applications for you and your business:

· Joy is a much more powerful motivator than fear, especially over the long haul.

· Major, comprehensive changes are easier to sustain than small, incremental ones, because they are more likely to break up old and unproductive habit patterns, and because they are more likely to produce positive and immediately measurable changes in results, which serve to reinforce the new behaviors.

You can see the validity of the first idea (that joy is a more powerful motivator than fear) just by looking at your own experience. It is hard-wired into your biological programming to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Certainly it is sometimes necessary to delay gratification – to work for a longer period of time at achieving a big goal in order to get an even bigger payoff. But 20 years of coaching has taught me that the people who find a way to have fun with their work every day are much more likely to stick with it for as long as it takes – just as the people who find a way to have fun with their workouts are more likely to stick with a commitment to go to the gym 4 times a week.

One way to do that is to take pleasure in little victories or accomplishments. When you call a lead or prospect and get the appointment, take a moment to celebrate the win. Enjoy the moment whenever you have a good meeting or conversation with a client or referral partner, when you succeed in getting a tough loan approved, etc.

It also helps to be able to tie your daily work activities to a cause bigger than yourself – whether it’s supporting your family, helping people to buy a home of their own and move closer to financial independence, or creating your own wealth so that you’ll be in a better position to contribute to others – it is much easier to find the joy in life when you are not focusing exclusively on your own personal, petty needs and desires. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s advice to the graduates at a university commencement speech:

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

It can be a little harder to embrace the second idea (that major, comprehensive changes are easier to sustain than small, incremental ones); it can seem a little counterintuitive. Isn’t it harder to make a lot of big changes at once – and easier to change one little thing at a time?

You might think so, but the evidence from the Ornish study is pretty clear. And if we apply it to your business life, the argument goes like this: If you’re in a rut and you can’t seem to get any traction in your business, small changes are going to produce small results, and small results are not going to motivate you to persist with the changes you’re trying to make.

Whatever you have done up to now in your work life has gotten you to where you are today – the good and the bad.

Maybe you have changed your strategies and work habits over time (and maybe you haven’t), but one thing is certain: the environment in which you operate has changed dramatically.

· From a high of about $5 trillion in 2003, mortgage loan volume has shrunk significantly. Total volume in the first half of 2009 was about 1.07 trillion, aided by a big jump in refinances in the second quarter (and that trend now appears to be over). It’s hard to imagine how we will be much over $2 trillion for the year, and the final number could be less than that.

· Real median home prices (adjusted for inflation) have fallen more than 36% in the last 3 years -- from a high of $264,650 in the first quarter of 2006 to $169,000 in the first quarter of 2009 (with no solid indication yet that we have hit bottom).

· Mortgage loans are harder to get approved, and entire product lines have disappeared (remember zero-down loans?). More than 300 major U.S. lending operations (and thousands of small broker firms) have gone under since the end of 2006.

We’re talking about the equivalent of major heart disease for an entire industry. I don’t know anyone who has been unaffected by the events of the last 3-4 years, but I am working with clients who have responded to the challenge, have made some major changes in the way they do business, are holding their own today, and are building the foundation for a brighter future.

If you aren’t completely satisfied with your performance and results these days; if you’re concerned about your future in the mortgage industry, I have some recommendations for you that are along the lines of the Ornish approach to heart disease. Remember the message of “Change or Die” is this: Your chances of sustaining positive lifestyle/workstyle changes over the long run are much, much better if you undertake major, comprehensive changes, instead of tweaking little things here and there. Why? Because major changes are more likely to produce faster, more significant results that you can see fairly quickly, so you’ll be much more motivated to sustain the effort over time – because it will be fun.

Remember the old $6 Million Man TV show about the astronaut badly injured in an accident who was transformed into a Bionic Man? What I’m saying is: “We can rebuild you. We have the technology. We can make you better, stronger, faster.”

The loan originator of the future will be much more than an application taker or even someone who is proficient at selecting loan programs and getting files approved. Those skills might have enabled you to make a decent living 5 or 10 years ago. But if you want to be a successful mortgage originator today and in the future, you’ll need to expand your vision of what a professional originator is and does. The qualities and skills we used to consider fundamental for a successful loan officer will continue to be important; they will be necessary but not sufficient. To be successful in today’s environment, you will need to both transcend and include the old model of a mortgage professional.

7 Critical Skills for the 21^st Century Mortgage Professional

If you’re willing to consider remaking yourself into much more than you currently are, I have identified below some of the areas where you will want to grow your skills. Each area is a separate line of development. Within each line of development, there are levels of development or proficiency. A loan originator, for example, may be well-developed in “financial competency”, for example, but be much less developed in other lines, like Marketing, or Sales, or the ability to use Technology effectively (see chart below).

An honest self-assessment will tell you in which of these lines you are weakest. If you want to be a fully functioning, successful mortgage loan originator, you’ll want to improve your level of development in each of these lines – especially in those lines where your development is weakest.

Real Estate. People take out mortgage loans as a way of financing the purchase of a home. (They also refinance their existing mortgages for other purposes; see Financial Competency below.) The ability of average Americans to own real estate, despite our recent troubles, is still the envy of the world – almost 70% of American families own their homes. The right loan can make owning a home more affordable; the right loan can make owning a home a better financial decision. The right loan can save the client money over the “wrong” loan. But the most important factors for the homebuyer’s quality of life and financial well being are finding the right home, and negotiating the price they pay for that home. So mortgage lenders who have not educated themselves on their local real estate market are missing a tremendous opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competitors and dramatically enhance the value of the service they offer their clients. Show a client how to save $5,000 to 10,000 (or more) on the purchase price of their home and you will have saved them far more money than if you had done the loan for them for free.

Far too many loan officers are essentially ignorant about their local real estate market. They don’t know how many homes are sold in a month; they don’t know the ratio of sales to available inventory, or what that inventory looks like in terms of size, location, condition, features, etc., and they don’t know anything about the relationship between listing prices and final sales prices. Some of my most successful loan originator clients have taken the time and trouble to get their real estate licenses so they can better understand that side of the business and have access to the data in their local MLS system. But whether you get your real estate license or not, you need to be educated about your local real estate market or you’re going to severely limit your usefulness to your purchase clients.

Marketing. You have to understand the fundamentals of marketing – how to target a specific demographic/market with enough potential to be profitable, how to find out what your prospective clients really want, and how to find and reach them in a cost-effective way with a message that gives them exactly what they want, in the form of an offer they can’t refuse. If you understand these fundamentals, and you can deliver on your offer, you can thrive in any set of market conditions. If you don’t understand these fundamentals, you will at best be imitating people who figured it out before you did.

You don’t have to get a degree in marketing, or become quite as knowledgeable about it as people who successfully make their living in this field. But a working knowledge of the basic principles will always help you figure out where the opportunities are and how to take advantage of them. It will also make you more competent to evaluate the skills of anyone you might contract with to provide you with marketing services.

Sales. What does it mean to be a true sales professional? For one thing, it has nothing to do with how slick and smooth you are, and everything to do with the intention with which you enter every encounter with prospects, clients, and referral sources. As Zig Ziglar has said many, many times over the years, “You can have anything you want in this world if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” If you approach your sales work with a genuine and sincere spirit of service, people will open up to you more. If they open up to you more, and they can tell that you are listening to them, they will trust you. If after fully understanding what it is they hope to achieve, you make a recommendation that you believe will be the best way for them to get what they’ve already told you they want, they will buy it. And you will sleep well at night.

Top sales professionals have great empathy -- the ability to identify with and understand somebody else's feelings or difficulties; the ability to feel what it feels like to be in another person’s shoes.

And the top sales professionals are expert communicators. Not only can they explain an idea or concept in terms that are interesting and easy for people to follow, but even more importantly, they have developed the ability to ask great questions and listen carefully to what their prospects say. When your listening skills are at least as good as your speaking skills, you can establish rapport and trust with almost anyone.

Financial Competency. It may seem ironic to you (and it certainly does to me) that we have loan officers in this industry with little or no background, training, or knowledge in personal finance management and financial literacy. You are advising people on the biggest transaction most of them are likely to have made in their lives up until now. Shouldn’t you know enough about it to be able to speak with some credibility and authority – not just about the loan program, but about how the home purchase and the mortgage financing will fit into their overall financial future and well-being?

There are four levels of competency. At the lowest level, you don’t know the subject matter, but you don’t even know that you don’t know. At the next level, you still don’t know, but you’re aware that you don’t know it. At the third level, you understand the material, but you’re unable to communicate it clearly to others. Many LOs are stuck at this level; their explanations of the differences between loan programs would put a caffeine addict to sleep.

At the highest level of competency, not only do you understand the subject, but you can also explain it clearly and simply to someone of average intelligence who doesn’t have your training -- and it will make sense to them. The main reason loan originators lose the confidence of their clients is because they come across as being simultaneously defensive and incoherent when trying to explain something like loan pricing.

Technology. What’s your comfort level with the technology that surrounds us today? Do you have, and are you proficient with your LOS, database, calendaring, email, word processing, graphic design, and other software programs? Do you know how to put on a Webinar? Create a video presentation or an audio email? Do you have an effective website (and by effective, I mean does it generate leads that you convert into closed transactions in such a way that your website is a profit center for you?

If you don’t know how to do these kinds of things, you’re in serious danger of becoming obsolete.

For some people, technology can be intimidating. But consider this: some people consider evaluating mortgages to be intimidating. You didn’t learn what you know about mortgage financing overnight, you started at the beginning and kept putting one foot in front of the other until you got to where you are today. Why should understanding and being able to use technology be any different?

Leadership. Even if you’re “just” a loan officer, with no employees, leadership skills are vital to your success. There are 3 characteristics of great leaders:

• Vision -- the ability to see things clearly – both as they are now, and as they could be

• Influence -- the ability to understand, persuade, and move people

• Courage – a fierce resolve; a refusal to ever give up

Without vision, it will be difficult for you to imagine how things could be much better than they are right now. Without influence, you will not be effective in dealing with prospects, clients, processors, underwriters, real estate agents, etc. And without courage, you will be unable to take calculated risks, or persist in the face of adversity.

As with any of these lines of development I have been discussing here, leadership is a skill that can be learned and strengthened. While it may be true that some people have more natural gifts in the area, what matters is where you finish, not where you start.

Systems/Planning/Time Management. The nationally-known management consultant David Allen calls it Getting Things Done — in fact, he wrote a book about it with that as his title. And of course, it’s not just about getting “things” done, it’s about getting enough of the right things done, and getting them done well enough that you can say they were a success.

You can get better at creating systems that support the relatively effortless generation of leads, the acquisition of clients, and the closing of loans. You can not only get better at getting more things done; you can also get better at getting more of the most important things done. It is a skill: wherever you happen to be in this – or any of these other lines of development, you do not have to remain there forever. We have the technology. We can make you better, stronger, faster.

How to Make Big Changes, So Your Business Doesn’t Die

Let’s say you see room for improvement in your overall level of development in one or more of the lines of development outlined above. Let’s also say that you can see that these areas where you aren’t as developed as you’d like to be are holding you back from accomplishing what you want to accomplish in your profession, and that you’ve acquired a greater sense of urgency as a result of what you see happening in the economy in general and the mortgage sector specifically. What can you do about it?

If we learn from the lessons of the Ornish experiment, the answer is clear: you have to stop trying to motivate yourself with fear, and be prepared to start making substantive changes across the broad range of your business activities, so that you can produce bigger results faster – the kind of results that make you want to continue with the positive changes you’re making. And for someone in the mortgage business, the 7 Critical Skills I’ve described her would be a sensible place to start.

It can be tremendously helpful to work with a coach who knows the territory and has guided others through it. Everything you know how to do has gotten you to where you are today, and you may have good reason to be proud of your accomplishments. But if you want to go farther, if you realize that the mortgage industry and the markets have changed and you need to adapt to those changes, and especially if you know you need to improve in one of more of these 7 Critical Skills, complete the response form here and I will give you a free, private, 1-hour coaching session, where we can talk about your unique situation and make a plan that will get you where you want to be.

Who Knows Where Your Time Goes?

coachbob505@msn.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:20:00 GMT

Who Knows Where Your Time Goes?

Get Organized for Success

“Time is money”. – Benjamin Franklin

Some of my clients make over $500,000 per year. I also know a loan officer who figured out that she makes $3.28 per hour. She works about the same hours as my clients who make half a million dollars, and makes about the same money per transaction. (She just does a lot fewer transactions.) She is intelligent and articulate, and while there are other reasons for the gap between her income and that of my more successful clients, one of the most significant differences is in the way she uses her time.

I will be presenting a Free Webinar to help you:

· Improve your productivity

· Decrease stress and anxiety

· Gain better focus

· Improve your follow-up and follow-through

· Control Interruptions

· Create effective daily & weekly plans

· Manage your work flow

· Eliminate distracting clutter & stacks of paper

Date: Tuesday, August 18^th

Time: 2:00 PM Eastern v 1:00 PM Central v 12:00 Noon Mountain v 11:00 AM Pacific

Duration: 1 hour

Even if you can’t make that time, sign up for the Webinar and you’ll receive a video recording of the live event.

To register, go to http://www.coachbobwilliamson.com/Page/FreeTimeManagementWebinar.aspx

Where the Opportunities Are for Originators Now

coachbob505@msn.com — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Ronald Reagan used to love to tell the story about a father who had two young sons: one was constantly worried and saw the danger or downside in everything; his other son was a perpetual sunny optimist. At Christmas time, the father decided to try an experiment. He gave his first son a beautiful and expensive Cartier watch. For his second son, he gift-wrapped a box with a pile of horse manure inside.

On Christmas Morning, the boys opened their presents. The first son looked at his beautiful new watch and immediately worried that if he wore it, it would either get broken or someone would steal it.

The second son opened his box of horse poop, became delirious with excitement, and started running around the yard, looking behind bushes and trees. “Son, what are you doing?’ asked the father. And the boy (who could barely contain his joy) said, “Dad! There’s got to be a pony around here somewhere!!!”

Let’s Have a Look at the “Horse-Poop” of Current Economic News. There’s Got to Be a Pony Around Here Somewhere.

Mortgage Rates Moving in One Direction – Up. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve stepped up debt purchases in an effort to drive down rates, but yields on 10-year Treasury bonds, which mortgage rates closely track, have risen recently amid concerns of rising inflation, according to the Wall St. Journal.

US lurching towards debt explosion with long-term interest rates on course to double. In a 2003 paper, Thomas Laubach, then the US Federal Reserve’s senior economist, calculated the impact on long-term interest rates of rising fiscal deficits and soaring national debt. Applying his assumptions to the recent spike in the US fiscal deficit and national debt, the UK Telegraph suggests that long-term interest rates will double from current levels. And that’s before we factor in the Obama administration’s plans for health care “reform” and the Cap & Trade “Energy” bill. As of June 16^th, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was 3.67%. As you know, as Treasury yields rise, bond yields will have to increase in order to compete. Bottom Line: The long-term picture for mortgage interest rates looks worse, not better.

Weakness in Mortgage Refinancing. Not surprisingly, then, the Mortgage Bankers Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27% because of declining prospects for a continued boom (or even a mini-boom) in refinancing.

The rise in rates has choked off new refinance originations, but analysts believe it could spur more potential buyers to close transactions amid concerns that rates will keep going up. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association weekly survey. refinance applications fell to 46.4% of all mortgage applications. That means the number of new purchase applications exceeded refi apps.

Meanwhile, the MBA said the volume of refinancing under the Obama administration's Home Affordable Refinance Program so far has been "very low."

Increased Loss Mitigation Failing to Keep Pace with Defaults, Foreclosures. The Federal Housing Finance Agency reported on June 30th that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac significantly stepped up their foreclosure prevention activities in the first quarter of 2009. But according to Inside Mortgage Finance, those efforts failed to keep pace with both the jump in serious delinquencies and foreclosures started with GSE mortgages during the three-month period. The latest FHFA numbers show that completed actions to prevent foreclosure – including loan modifications – rose to 86,600 at the GSEs. But those numbers were dwarfed by the rise in 60 days or more delinquent loans (173,700) and the huge jump in foreclosures started on Fannie/Freddie loans in the first quarter (243,800).

Rising Unemployment Making Foreclosure Reductions More Difficult. The Wall St. Journal reported on June 26^th that rising unemployment is complicating the Obama administration's effort to reduce foreclosures and stabilize the housing market.

The Obama program provides financial incentives to mortgage-servicing companies and investors to reduce mortgage-related payments to 31% of monthly income, but many borrowers don't have sufficient income to qualify for a loan modification under the plan. One counseling agency reported that 45% of the more than 900 borrowers who sought help would fall into that category even if their interest rate were dropped to 2% and their loan term were extended to 40 years. Many of those unqualified borrowers suffered job losses or a reduction in income. Roughly 27% of borrowers who called the mortgage industry's national "Hope Hotline" in the second quarter of 2009 cited unemployment as the primary or secondary reason for their mortgage problems, triple the rate in the second quarter of 2008.

In the meantime, there are signs the overall mortgage-delinquency problem is getting worse. The percentage of mortgage loans that were at least 30 days past due but not yet in foreclosure climbed to a record 8.49% in May, up from 8.08% in April and 5.66% a year earlier, according to LPS Applied Analytics.

Distressed Properties Now Account for Two-Thirds of Home Sales. An ongoing flood of mortgage defaults and foreclosures is dramatically changing the home sale landscape in the U.S. According to preliminary results from a new nationwide survey of housing conditions sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, nearly two-thirds of all home sale transactions now involve some sort of distressed properties.

OK, Enough Horse Poop – Where’s the Pony?

Whenever market conditions change, those changes create “winners” and “losers” – people who benefit from the changes and people who suffer negative consequences from them.

You and I are in no position to control market conditions. What we can do is pay attention to them and adapt accordingly. So when conditions change, your primary job as a mortgage originator is to identify the potential winners and find a way to help them take advantage of those changes. Secondarily, you may also be able to help the potential losers in this scenario to mitigate the effects of the change on them.

Who are the winners and losers in the current market environment?

Interest rates are still low – for now – taken in historical context. But there is evidence that consumers who are considering a home purchase are now feeling a greater sense of urgency because of concerns that mortgage interest rates are headed upwards.

In addition, the first-time homebuyer tax credit is set to expire on November 30^th of this year. There are proposals in Congress to extend that deadline, and even to expand the size of the tax credit. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it passes and is signed into law, but that hasn’t happened yet and it is by no means a sure thing.

Finally, home prices continue to move downward. The latest numbers suggest that the rate of decline in prices may be slowing, and some of the more optimistic analysts are saying that we’re nearing the bottom of the price slide. However, there is no indication that the foreclosure tsunami has ended. As the numbers I reviewed above show, distressed properties currently make up about two-thirds of all the homes being sold. That is huge, and there’s no question that this exerts downward pressure on home prices.

Add to that the fact that there are almost a quarter of a million new foreclosures in the pipeline, and another 174,000 homeowners who are 60+ days delinquent, and you have a recipe for a continued very strong Buyers Market for the foreseeable future.

I believe the most important “winners” in the current configuration of market variables are:

· People who are in the market to buy a home – especially first-time homebuyers.

· Real estate investors and

The immediate future for the mortgage industry looks challenging, to say the least. Originators are going to have to work smarter and be flexible enough to adapt to changing markets and opportunities. You can be successful if you have strategies for finding and closing the kinds of loans that are being done now, and if you’re willing to recognize that the world has changed and that you can no longer do business the way you did as recently as just a few months ago.

Housing prices and the financial markets will eventually stabilize. You may not particularly like the world we’re living in right now, but it’s the one we’ve got. And it can’t hurt to remember the words of Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone with the Wind: “After all... tomorrow is another day.”

The first-time buyers you want are people who have good income, good credit (generally 620+), and sufficient savings to make the required FHA down payment. I have developed lead generation tools to help you find these people, marketing tools to get them to respond to you, and sales tools and pipeline management systems to help you close their transactions. If this is a market that appeals to you, click here to fill out a brief response form, and I will give you a free hour of private coaching so we can talk in detail about my ideas for finding and closing first-time buyer transactions.

The investors you would want to target are small and beginning investors who don’t plan to pay cash for their acquisitions. I have developed lead generation tools to help you find these people, marketing tools to get them to respond to you, and sales tools to help you close transactions. If this is a market that appeals to you, click here to fill out a brief response form, and I will give you a free hour of private coaching so we can talk in detail about my ideas for finding and closing small/beginning investor transactions.

How to Make an Effective Realtor Presentation

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:08:00 GMT

How would you like to be able to sit down with real estate agents, and make a powerfully persuasive presentation that ends with their enthusiastic commitment to working with you, as equal partners, so that you each get a bigger piece of your local purchase market's pie?

How to Get Appointments with Realtors

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:52:00 GMT

About 80% of all home buyers are introduced to their mortgage lender by their real estate agent. So, if there were 500 purchase transactions in your market last month where the buyers did not use their own cash, 400 of them were referred to their loan officer by a Realtor

How to Close More Purchase Transactions

coachbob505@msn.com — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:53:00 GMT

I had a great time sharing ideas with Mortgage Coach Members on the weekly call yesterday. And I appreciate the questions, comments, and ideas that members contributed in the chat room.

My topic was “How to close more purchase transactions”, and I focused on 3 elements:

1. Generating purchase money leads that are fundable in today’s marketplace;

2. Developing more productive relationships with real estate agents; and&

How to Plan for a Successful 2009 (Part 3)

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:40:00 GMT

If you’ve read the first two parts of this series, you have already set realistic and meaningful production goals for 2009, and you’ve broken them down into the 6 Critical Results – the specific benchmarks on the way to a closed loan.

If you followed the instructions in Part 2, you’ve identified how many leads you need to generate each month, how many sales contacts you must make, how many applications you need to take, and how many submissions, approvals, and closings will be necessar

How to Plan for a Successful 2009 (Part 2)

coachbob505@msn.com — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:13:00 GMT

If you’ve paid any attention to the science of goal setting, you probably already know the basics:

· The goal must be specific, and measurable. If it isn’t, how will you know whether you’ve achieved it?

How to Plan for a Successful 2009 (Part 1)

coachbob505@msn.com — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 20:51:00 GMT

There is something about the approach of a new year that awakens a sense of hope and possibility in even the most cynical among us. So let’s go with that feeling, and see if we can’t generate a thought process that makes a positive difference in the way we approach our planning for the upcoming year.

I’ll start with a couple of things you probably don’t want to do …

Double Your Originations in 12 Weeks

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:59:00 GMT

The economics of mortgage origination are really pretty simple:

The more good leads you generate, the more chances you get to convert them to loan applications ...

The more apps you take, the more loans you close ...

And the more loans you close, the more money you make.

In twenty years of coaching mortgage professionals, I've been privileged to help many people double their production, and more.

I've had the chance to work with some of the mortgage industry's most successful originators.

And I paid careful attention to the things that separated the big winners from the rest.
But my biggest contributions to the mortgage industry have come from my ability to put myself inside the minds of mortgage loan customers, real estate agents, and other stakeholders who have the biggest impact on the careers of loan originators.

The only way I could provide my clients the edge they needed to outsmart their competition was to find out what their customers and stakeholders wanted and weren't getting, and figure out a way for my clients to be the first to give it to them.

I have just created a new 12-week online course, in which I will share my secrets of "super-productivity" for loan officers with you ... and help you close more loans and make more money.

With these simple secrets, you can double or triple your originations ... and income ... in just 12 weeks. The course comes with a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee, so participants will be able to take the course – and receive over 300 pages of study materials, marketing pieces, scripts, and sales presentations – with no risk. To find out more, click here: Double Your Income in 12 Weeks

In Search of the Silver Bullet

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:39:00 GMT

It has been said that “desperate times call for desperate measures.” That would explain a lot of the extreme anxiety I see in loan originators who are frantically looking for the Holy Grail of Mortgage Lending: The Easy Way to Close More Loans.

Let's look at the allure of the easy answer, the realities of this market, and the qualities and skillsets that are really required to be a successful loan originator today.

How Do YOU Handle Adversity?

coachbob505@msn.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:24:00 GMT

The way you respond to problems, challenges, setbacks and general bad news says more about you than you probably realize.

It's also a pretty good predictor of where you'll be a year from now.

In this new article, I take a comprehensive look at the factors that allow some loan originators to succeed in the worst market