Job success rates for mortgage loan officers improve with good training and mentoring programs, especially when starting out. Like any profession, the better the training and mentoring, the higher the likelihood of success.
Those who take their careers to new heights get advice from mortgage bankers with many decades of experience. They also learn how to use state-of-the-art mortgage loan marketing and sales tools to generate a steady stream of leads.
10 Tips for becoming a mortgage loan officer
Besides training and support, here are 10 tips to become a top-producing mortgage loan officer:
- Avoid making promises that you can’t keep. Don’t always tell people what they want to hear. It’s tempting to persuade an anxious customer that everything will work out well when you have your doubts. It’s better to be candid up front and tell them about their realistic chance of success. If you do promise something, make sure you can deliver. Rather than saying “yes” to assuage anxiety or win people over, or hoping everything will work out for the best, it’s sometimes better to say no and provide a professional explanation. In short, it’s better to under-promise and then over-deliver.
- Stay positive through the ups and downs. This work can be difficult and challenging at times, which means that it’s easy to slip into a feeling of frustration when things don’t work out. While many setbacks do happen, good things also happen during the course of the day, so it’s important to focus on what’s working to stay motivated.
- Avoid taking people or circumstances personally. If real estate agents aren’t engaging or if customers complain about the quality of your work, you are not always the cause of their frustration. Often enough people are going through their own psychological turmoil and just looking for someone to blame. Do the best you can and then move on rather than get entangled in conflicts.
- Pay attention to all the details of your work, and one way to do that is to be thoroughly organized, working from a designated office and filing your online and offline information in a way that you can access quickly. Organization leads to speed and competence; and, in the long run, the work will become easier as you develop systems.
- Along with organization, become good at planning. Plan a week ahead and don’t change your plans unless absolutely necessary. Mortgage loan officers who don’t plan are setting themselves up for failure. Besides planning, take time to do reviews. At the end of each day, review the events of the day. At the end of the each week, review how the week went. Be honest about any mistakes that you might have made and see where you can improve. Reviewing your day and your week also helps you get better at time management.
- Keep making those sales calls. Besides making sales calls consistently, visit with your prospects on a regular basis, and learn how to talk to people about things that interest them. Also, show up at business community events and get to know more people. You never know who you might meet by showing up on a regular basis. Finally, stay in touch with customers after prequalifying them and after closing.
- Stay proactive and follow up on all leads, customer contacts, or other forms of interpersonal communication. By returning calls quickly and by not postponing for tomorrow what you can do today, you will be able to handle problems as they come along. Procrastination causes problems to get worse. In addition, problems tend to pile up.
- Pick loans that have a good chance of closing. After some experience, you’ll be able to distinguish those that have a good chance of success from those that are doomed from the start. This discrimination in picking loans will increase your rate of success. This will help with career advancements.
- The more you know, the better you will be able to serve your customers. Besides taking a course in how to do your work better, also learn from your mistakes to get better at delivering results. If the firm you work for has training opportunities, be sure to accept them and ask questions about things you don’t understand.
- Ask satisfied customers for referrals. Every time you ask someone for a quality introduction, you are creating a possible opportunity for future business.
The notion that all you need to do well as a mortgage loan officer is have a relevant education, acquire good connections, work for a well-established firm, and be fairly well-connected in the business community is not entirely true. In fact, even if you work for a financial institution, where the marketing department is in charge of generating leads and all you are asked to do is nurture prospects, you still need to get good at generating your own leads, too.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
