Movement Mortgage, a national top-10 retail mortgage lender, has expanded its Pacific Northwest and Mountain West capabilities by agreeing to acquire the retail mortgage operations of Eagle Home Mortgage LLC.

The transaction is expected to add $1.5 billion in additional annual mortgage loan volume to Movement's origination platform. The acquisition, which is scheduled to close later this month, will also increase Movement's national retail mortgage footprint by 230 mortgage originators and 35 branch offices.

"We want to grow, and we relentlessly look for purpose-filled, growth-minded mortgage professionals who want to make a meaningful difference in their industry and communities. We found all of those qualities and more in the team at Eagle Home Mortgage," says Movement Chief Executive Casey Crawford. "I'm excited and honored to welcome these talented individuals to Movement."

The Eagle Home Mortgage assets are concentrated in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West regions, including offices and operations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Movement expects to retain the staff across the acquired branch network and integrate the business with its existing retail network of more than 650 branches and 1,500 loan officers nationwide.

"Movement provides our loan officers and support teams with the industry's best process and service, innovative technology and a culture that emphasizes caring for customers, teammates and communities," says Eagle Home Mortgage Senior Vice President Kisha Weir.

Movement kicked off the acquisition announcement with a four-day roadshow across four states, as executive sales and operations leadership visited Eagle associates in Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Boise, Idaho; and Denver.

Guild Mortgage has licensed Homebot, a personalized financial dashboard that enables loan officers to provide borrowers with a better understanding of their home finances.

[caption id="attachment_8828" align="alignright" width="291"] Guild employed the technology, so loan officers could serve as 'trusted advisors.'[/caption]

The technology enables loan officers to offer customers relevant data, economic insights and market intelligence and stay connected with homeowners in a meaningful, personalized way long after the mortgage transaction has closed.

Homebot’s home digests and market reports provide monthly, easy-to-read, updated home financial advice. Homeowners receive free, regular insights, including their current home value and how their equity is building over time. Also, it covers refinancing opportunities, purchasing power for buying a new home or trading up to a new home, cash flow and short-term rental opportunities.

“We are always looking for opportunities to provide our customers with more information about what is likely the most important investment in their life and how it can contribute to long-term security,” said Mary Ann McGarry, president and CEO of Guild. “Homebot will help our loan officers enhance their roles as trusted advisors by delivering invaluable insights that are important to each homeowner’s financial future. Creating deeper and more valued relationships is part of our focus on keeping customers for life.”

With Homebot’s marketing automation software, loan officers can deliver personalized home finance intelligence on a regular basis with ease. The technology takes care of the manual labor associated with traditional email marketing, with no burden on the loan officer or their staff. Monthly digests are branded for each loan officer, helping homeowners and homebuyers make a stronger connection with their trusted mortgage professional on topics that help them save money and build equity through home ownership.

Guild Mortgage will provide the company’s more than 1,100 loan officers nationwide access to Homebot’s marketing automation software as part of its ongoing customer retention initiative. The Homebot Lender Base service will be available to Guild loan officers.

“Our loan officers who are currently on this platform have had success engaging their customers and starting conversations with those who may be looking to refinance or make another purchase transaction,” said David Neylan, senior vice president of business development at Guild. “We listened to their feedback and are pleased to partner with Homebot to make their platform available to all of our loan officers.”

The aim was to support Guild’s focus on technology and customer service, that would make the borrower’s experience more straightforward.

“The relationship between the professional and homeowner doesn’t start and stop at the home purchase transaction,” said Ernie Graham, CEO of Homebot. “Today’s consumers demand and deserve more--an advocate who will be with them before they purchase their first home and throughout the lifecycle of homeownership to help them make the best possible decisions with their investment.”

The technology enables loan officers to offer customers relevant data, economic insights and market intelligence as well as stay connected with homeowners in a meaningful, personalized way long after the mortgage transaction has closed.

Homebot’s home digests and market reports provide monthly, easy-to-read, updated home financial advice. Homeowners receive free, regular insights, including their current home value and how their equity is building over time. Also, it covers refinancing opportunities, purchasing power for buying a new home or trading up to a new home, cash flow and short-term rental opportunities.

“We are always looking for opportunities to provide our customers with more information about what is likely the most important investment in their life and how it can contribute to long-term security,” said Mary Ann McGarry, president and CEO of Guild. “Homebot will help our loan officers enhance their roles as trusted advisors by delivering invaluable insights that are important to each homeowner’s financial future. Creating deeper and more valued relationships is part of our focus on keeping customers for life.”

With Homebot’s marketing automation software, loan officers can deliver personalized home finance intelligence on a regular basis with ease. The technology takes care of the manual labor associated with traditional email marketing, with no burden on the loan officer or their staff. Monthly digests are branded for each loan officer, helping homeowners and homebuyers make a stronger connection with their trusted mortgage professional on topics that help them save money and build equity through home ownership.

Guild Mortgage will provide the company’s more than 1,100 loan officers nationwide access to Homebot’s marketing automation software as part of its ongoing customer retention initiative. The Homebot Lender Base service will be available to Guild loan officers.

“Our loan officers who are currently on this platform have had success engaging their customers and starting conversations with those who may be looking to refinance or make another purchase transaction,” said David Neylan, senior vice president of business development at Guild. “We listened to their feedback and are pleased to partner with Homebot to make their platform available to all of our loan officers.”

The aim was to support Guild’s focus on technology and customer service, that would make the borrower’s experience more straightforward.

“The relationship between the professional and homeowner doesn’t start and stop at the home purchase transaction,” said Ernie Graham, CEO of Homebot. “Today’s consumers demand and deserve more--an advocate who will be with them before they purchase their first home and throughout the lifecycle of homeownership to help them make the best possible decisions with their investment.”

 By Brian Sacks

We work in a business that can often be quite frustrating for many different reasons. If your days are anything like mine, then you are constantly working on the following aspects of your business every day.

--Bringing in new deals.

--Closing the deals you have.

--Managing Staff: Even if you are a loan officer you still need to make sure your processor, closer and assistants are doing their jobs.

--Creating new relationships and protecting your existing ones from poachers.

None of this, of course, includes taking the applications, dealing with the day-to-day issues on files, and all the other issues with the people you are or have pre-qualified.

 Let’s compare this to what we would like:

--Consistent and predictable deal flow, not 5 deals one week and zero for the next 3.
--Agents that were loyal only to us.
--Staff that actually did what they needed to do and get paid to do.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a banker or a broker, we all have the same issues. I have had them all myself, and to be perfectly transparent, I still have challenges from time to time.

But many years ago, when I was struggling and at a crossroads, I made a decision to actually stay in this crazy business that allows me, a high school graduate with no college degree, to earn more money than I could doing anything else.

At that time, I was considering leaving and trying something else. Or once and for all committing to build my mortgage business.

You already know which one I chose but here’s how I made it work.

I created the acronym PIT for Plan, Implement, Track. It’s going to sound very simple to you, and it is, which is why most don’t practice it.If you are being honest with yourself, you know you don’t do this. Instead, you find some new tactic or guru and you decide to try what they are pushing and then you hope and pray like hell it works. And sometimes it actually does work but most of the time you just feel like you were suckered one more time.

Let me break down each part of PIT for you.

Let’s start with P for Plan.
Notice I didn’t say H for Hope because that is what most of us do each year.
--We hope rates will not skyrocket.
--We hope that past clients will refer us.
--We hope our agents will stay loyal.
--We hope for a good year but Hope will never allow you to achieve your goals.

But keep reading because I am going to give you the solution.Planning means that you have a firm figure that you want to earn. Not a good year, but rather I want to, or will, earn $120,000 in 2019. You pick your number. Now break it down, as follows:
--What is your average loan amount?
--How much do you earn per loan?

Now you have real figures and you actually know how many loans you need to do each month and week. For example, if you want to earn $120,000 for the year, with an average loan amount of $250,000 and earn 100 bps, you need 48 loans a year or four each month to reach the income goal.

But having a plan is not enough unless you Implement it. You need to have proven strategies that work now.
There are a couple of challenges with implementing PIT. The first issue is to know what to Implement. I am probably the most easily distracted you will run into, which is why I created this plan for myself and feel the need to share it.

We are bombarded daily with fake experts trying to sell their products. Most have never originated a loan and have no idea if it works or not. Others were loan originators many years ago and have no clue of our reality today.

Think of your marketing as a chair with four legs.
To be successful, you must always have multiple ways of generating new deals. But you must control it.
So like a chair, you need four ways to generate new business, and here are some examples:
--Past client referrals
--Realtor referrals
--Direct to consumer, such as renters or others in a niche.
--Public Relations, or become a celebrity by writing articles, through social media, or appearing on radio and television.
--Other professional referrals.

The other mistake many originators make is only using one strategy. If that strategy stops working or is no longer allowed, such as faxing, Google ads or email spams, you are in real trouble. So, going back to our example, you need four loans a month and you need to pick four strategies and get one loan per month from each strategy.

But we are still not done, and here comes the most important part of PIT. There is nothing worse than sitting at your desk waiting for the phone to ring or for an email to arrive in your inbox. No, you must be proactive and implement your plan. But you must also know what’s working and what isn’t. So, on the first day of every month, you need to go back and review, or Track, performance.

--Did you make your goal or didn’t you?
--Did what you planned generate new deals?
--What worked and what did not?

Now you must go back and either tweak the parts of the strategy that didn’t work or replace it with one that will work. Unfortunately most of us don’t do this at all. Some only do this at the end of each year. To be successful, you must do it monthly.

 Successful loan officers Plan. Implement. Track. Use the PIT system to grow your production now.

About the Author
Brian Sacks, a recognized mortgage expert with Homebridge Financial Services Inc., has closed more than $1 billion in loans and 5, 890 mortgage transactions. He is the author of   “48 Proven Ways to Close More Loans In Next 30 Days … Regardless of Rates and the Real-Estate Market.” You can learn more at http://48waysbook.com.

MonitorBase has launched a platform that provides originators and borrowers access to an instant credit pre-qualification through a soft credit pull executed on their mobile device.

"Our pilot users are seeing very positive results and saving a bundle on credit report fees that would otherwise be wasted. Their referral partners also love that their prospects can use SoftPull to get a thumbs up on credit early in the process without a full loan application, or even a social security number," said Louis Zitting, CEO of MonitorBase.

"Consumers are evolving and expect answers on demand. SoftPull gives clients instant credit pre-qualification to a lender's products, early in the mortgage process. This provides both originators and their referral partner's clients the ability to text to pre-qualify anytime, anywhere," Zitting notes.

As mortgage companies pursue the digital mortgage process, a gap remains before the point of sale system where consumers are looking for low commitment ways to get answers and information. Systems like SoftPull are bridging the gap between shoppers and applicants.