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.

The CoreLogic Home Price Index and HPI Forecast for November 2018 shows home prices rose both year over year and month over month. Home prices increased nationally by 5.1 percent year over year from November 2017. On a month-over-month basis, prices increased by 0.4 percent in November 2018.

Looking ahead, the CoreLogic HPI Forecast indicates home prices will increase by 4.8 percent on a year-over-year basis from November 2018 to November 2019. On a month-over-month basis, home prices are expected to decrease by 0.8 percent from November to December 2018. The CoreLogic HPI Forecast is a projection of home prices calculated using the CoreLogic HPI and other economic variables. Values are derived from state-level forecasts by weighting indices according to the number of owner-occupied households for each state.

“The rise in mortgage rates has dampened buyer demand and slowed home-price growth,” said Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic. “Interest rates for new 30-year fixed-rate loans averaged 4.9 percent during November, the highest monthly average since February 2011. These higher rates and home prices have reduced buyer affordability. Home sellers are responding by lowering their asking price, which is reflected in the slowing growth of the CoreLogic Home Price Index.”

According to the CoreLogic Market Condition Indicators, an analysis of housing values in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas based on housing stock, 35 percent of metropolitan areas have an overvalued housing market as of November 2018. The MCI analysis categorizes home prices in individual markets as undervalued, at value or overvalued, by comparing home prices to their long-run, sustainable levels, which are supported by local market fundamentals (such as disposable income). Additionally, as of November 2018, 27 percent of the top 100 metropolitan areas were undervalued, and 38 percent were at value.

When looking at only the top 50 markets based on housing stock, 44 percent were overvalued, 18 percent were undervalued and 38 percent were at value. The MCI analysis defines an overvalued housing market as one in which home prices are at least 10 percent above the long-term, sustainable level. An undervalued housing market is one in which home prices are at least 10 percent below the sustainable level.

“A strong economy helps homeowners feel confident about the value of their property,” said Frank Martell, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “If recent declines in the stock market shakes consumer confidence in the national economy, we may see homeowners’ perception of home value change and a subsequent buyers’ market emerge in 2019.”