In the mortgage game, lead quality matters. It’s not like you’re trying to talk someone into making a cheap impulse purchase here. Instead, your customers are partnering with you for a long-term, high-stakes financial journey. A mortgage is usually one of the biggest money decisions people make. 

You really only want to put time and energy into leads that actually stand a chance to convert. If your loan officers spend too much time on people who aren’t anywhere close to being ready to buy a house, you’re not going to see high ROI on that time. Mortgage lending institutions succeed when they can fill their pipeline with high-quality leads. 

That begs a question, then: which leads are high-quality? The answer’s different for different companies. A brokerage specializing in jumbo loans is going to view leads very differently than one that primarily underwrites FHA loans, for example. 

Fortunately, your marketing team can help you here. By measuring and predicting mortgage lead quality, they give every loan officer tools to tell them where to allocate their energy. 

To help you better understand your lead quality, we recommend applying the following best practices to support lead scoring for lenders. These help you move away from vanity metrics and toward ones that actually move the needle on closings. 

#1: Monitor reply behavior

Reply behavior is one of the earliest and strongest indicators of mortgage lead quality. Figure out a way to track how leads typically respond to your initial outreach. 

If you deploy AI texting to quickly engage leads, for example, you should probably track the:

• Initial reply rate 
• The click-through rate on any links you send
• The appointments-scheduled rate (you probably want to have a finite time period here, like the number of appointments scheduled within the first 48 hours)

Arriving at these rates requires some fairly simple math. You just need to take the total number of initial texts sent and divide it by the metric (replies, click-throughs, etc.).

Go through a similar process for any other initial outreach you take, whether that’s emails or calls. 

By tracking replies to those early efforts, you get clarity about what’s working for leads. This helps you hone in on the right loan officer tools to keep in your portfolio.  

#2: Get clearer analysis with CRM tags

Your customer relationship management (CRM) platform contains a wealth of information. But is it easy to use to analyze mortgage lead quality? Adding tags gives your team an easy way to organize information so you can get better insights. 

Some tags you might want to set up in your CRM include:

• Lead source
• Loan program
• Credit score range
• Tags for certain activities, like credit pulls and prequalification letter downloads

It might also be helpful to establish tags that help your team categorize leads by personas, like a first-time buyer tag or one for self-employed folks. 

Then, you can use your CRM tags to develop dashboards that help you track what’s happening with your leads. And that visibility can help you spot trends and patterns. Using that information, you can finetune your sales processes. 

You might create a dashboard that lets you see closed loans sorted by lead source, for example. This insight helps you allocate your marketing budget more intelligently so you can optimize ROI. 

#3: Optimize lead scoring 

Lead scoring for lenders can feel tricky, but you can definitively measure mortgage lead quality by attaching specific metrics to it. 

Make this simple by thinking about the lead score as a bucket of 100 points. You can determine the quality of the lead by how many points it earns. Then, you just need to assign a certain number of points to different characteristics of the lead. More important factors warrant more points. You might give a reply within the first 24 hours 20 points, for example, while you only assign a pulled credit report five points. 

It’s up to your lending institution to decide what makes a good lead and to weigh those factors accordingly. To get you started, some of the most common mechanisms used in lead scoring for lenders include:

• Quick response (e.g., within the first 24 hours)
• Alignment with loan programs you offer
• Alignment with geographies you serve
• Website tools used (e.g., calculators, personalized rate dashboards)
• Credit pulled
• Credit score over a specific threshold (e.g., 620+)
• Loan application status (e.g., 10 points for started application, 15 for completed)
• Documents uploaded

You might also want to assign negative point values to certain lead characteristics, like:

• Unreachable phone numbers (e.g., wrong number, on the Do Not Call registry)
• No response after a certain number of touches
• Missing qualifications (e.g., overly low credit score, overly high debt-to-income ratio)

Again, lead scoring for lenders should be tailored to your specific organization. Tap your loan officers for their feedback here. They’ve probably noticed characteristics that make for “good” leads. Matching those to your lead scoring calculation helps you get a more accurate feel for mortgage lead quality. 

The score then becomes one of your most useful loan officer tools. Based on the score, your team gets guidance on how to handle that lead. A low score might mean putting them on an email drip campaign like rate alert emails. A score of 80 or above probably warrants aggressive personal outreach to try and connect with that lead and move them forward. 

Fine-tuning your mortgage lead quality metrics

Tracking lead engagement by watching reply behavior, leveraging CRM tags to build better dashboards, and establishing lead scoring parameters should all help you better manage mortgage lead quality. Your team should get faster clarity into which people are worth pursuing, and which they can redirect to your automated nurture tools (e.g., email drip campaigns, AI texting). 

The easier it is to generate data about each lead, the easier it is to tap into strong lead scoring for lenders. That’s why we’ve developed loan officer tools that can connect to your CRM. We offer options like personalized rate dashboards that track lead engagement while giving people the power to price their own loan scenarios, all while feeding this data to your CRM. 

If you want to see how you can tap into tools to support your mortgage lead quality evaluation — and more loan closings — book a demo with our team today. 

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