Helping Your Borrowers In A Tight Inventory Market

Today's Business & Life Tip, is about the subject matter of, "Your borrowers having a difficult time finding a property in today’s very tight inventory real estate market." What ends up happening after a few months is frustration starts to creep in and understandably so, maybe they’ve written a couple of offers and they were outbid, and maybe they’re just not finding that there is anything out there that is in the price range that they were hoping to find.

What are you doing to re-touch base and circle back with them?

Ryan Grant, who’s one of the great loan officers in the country, a friend and, a member of our Masters Program with Leadership 360, who's with Fairway Mortgage in Orange County California. He originated a process that I think is quite brilliant...

At the 90-Day mark after they got the person pre-approved, if they have not entered into a contract and found a property. They immediately schedule an appointment for that person to come back in and meet with Ryan again. One of the things that He asks them is this question, “What is it that you have learned about the process now over the last 90 days, since the last time we met?

The purpose of that is to give them an opportunity to share with him, some of their frustrations and challenges that they’re meeting. It is at that point in time that Ryan is going to re-educate them and set a new standard of expectations of what they are looking for when they go back out to look for a property. This might entail him working up a new set of numbers for the client with some slightly different types of loans, maybe a hybrid ARM 7/1 and 5/, where they are only looking a 30-year old fixed before. It may be talking to them about putting a home equity line of credit on the back side for an additional 10%, so they can get into a slightly higher value property with whatever down payment money that they have.

We go into these types of processes as borrowers looking for something specific and then when we find that it’s not out there, it can become frustrating. Having an opportunity to sit back down and re-strategize, just like an investment advisor might do with your portfolio ‒ If you have an investment strategy for certain allocation into bonds, stocks, mutual funds, and the market economy start to make a dramatic shift, you may shift the allocation strategy. If interest rates are going up it may be an opportunity to invest more money in short-term or long-term bonds, and less money in stocks. This is the same scenario you need to reconnect, touch base, understand what they have learned, update them on what’s going on in the market, where interest rates are because it’s your job to continue to earn their business.

They haven’t found a property yet and you’re in a very vulnerable spot until which time they do. Let's not assume or take for granted that, they are your client. Let’s continue to add value to them and to your real estate partner by helping get this client into a slightly different mental space than they may be in with their frustration.

I hope that you find this business tip helpful for you.