Among mortgage lending institutions, the last five years have surfaced a lot of talk about buying mortgage leads. It made sense. When rates were the highest we’ve seen recently, refinancing activity hit a low point. You needed new homebuyers to keep generating revenue. 

Fortunately, things are changing. As rates have climbed down, refinancing activity has picked up. Suddenly, you don’t need to go buy new leads. You have a wealth of potential sitting right there in your CRM. 

The key to unlocking this revived revenue stream lies in being there when those people decide they want to explore a refi. We built this refinance monitoring checklist to help you do just that. Go step by step and you set your lending institution up to capitalize on the uptick in activity here. 

Step 1: Look at your status quo

We’d be remiss if we didn’t start this refinance monitoring checklist at square one. You can’t build on something when you don’t know where your foundation currently stands. 

Take some time to review your current tools, processes, and workforce. This helps you get a better idea of where you need to make adjustments to seize more refinance opportunities. 

We recommend looking at three key categories here:

Your data

First things first, you need a centralized location to store information about all of your borrowers. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are purpose-built for precisely this. 

The trick is making sure your loan officers actually port all of their information into the CRM. Data in their own personal Rolodex doesn’t do your company any good as it tries to monitor refinancing opportunities. 

Ask your LOs how they store lead information. Then, make a plan to get everyone consistently using your CRM, and using it in the same way. 

Getting an idea of where your lead data lives helps you move through the next steps on this refinance monitoring checklist more strategically. When you know your status quo, you can build on that to get where you want to go. 

Your tech stack

Lead data isn’t the only area your lending team should review to prep for more refinance activity. You also want to look at your tech stack as a whole, or all the technologies you use and how they work together (i.e., integrations). 

Ideally, for example, your CRM integrates with your loan origination system (LOS) and both feed data back and forth. Your LOS gets extra powerful when it’s integrated with your product pricing engine (PPE), pulling in the latest rates. 

Just as importantly, your tech stack needs to integrate with the way your team actually works. Maybe your CRM sends automated reminders or alerts to help our loan officers better serve your borrowers, for example. 

Your team

Finally, as you wrap up this first review portion of the refinance monitoring checklist, look at your staff. How much bandwidth do your loan officers have? What about your marketing team? 

If more refinancing activity generates more business for your company, that’s going to mean more work for your employees. You need to put them in a position to take that on. 

Step 2: Identify shortcomings

As you perform your review, it might have raised some red flags. Fortunately, you’re at the right step in the refinance monitoring checklist to handle them. 

Where is your data siloed or unorganized? Where is your tech stack not meeting your team’s actual needs? Where is your staff stretched too thin? 

The answers will be unique to your lending institution. That said, we want to call out one area where we often see lenders struggle: clean and useful data in the CRM. 

Specifically, once your CRM captures a lead, the entry needs to include key data points:

• Current interest rate
• Credit score (with the date of the latest pull)
• Property address
• Loan type 
• Purchase price
• Current home value (this usually isn’t an out-of-the-box feature for CRMs, but leading platforms offer integration with automated valuation models [AVMs]) 
• Date their introductory rate expires (for ARM borrowers)

You can make this extra powerful by adding one additional field: the borrower’s target rate. Maybe your loan officer asked them about this when closing the loan. If not, the general rule goes that a 1% reduction is often enough for people to see savings.

Step 3: Make an action plan

We’ve finally reached the meat of this refinance monitoring checklist. The rest is important to set yourself up for success, but this is where the magic happens. 

Once you feel good about your data, your tech stack, and your team’s capabilities, it’s time to start the work on actually monitoring for refi candidates. That means developing an actionable plan to watch the borrowers in your CRM and reach out when refinancing would benefit them. 

We can make this easy and highly effective. How? With Dream Rate.

What Dream Rate can do

With this tool, we connect your CRM and your PPE, then automatically and continuously monitor your leads. Once Dream Rate detects that a lead hits its target rate, it automatically takes next steps, too. Specifically, it pings both your loan officer and the lead. 

The loan officer gets an email teeing up all the pertinent details about the refinancing opportunity. At the same time, the lead gets an email telling them that now could be the time to refinance and save. 

That automated initial outreach helps to warm the lead. When your LO gets in touch, then, they should have an easier time moving that borrower forward. 

Dream Rate’s ideal if the shortcomings you identified in step two had anything to do with the integration of your tech stack or your team’s bandwidth. We’ve designed this tool to seamlessly sync your CRM and your PPE. And with automated monitoring and alert emails, we help your company tap into more refi business without putting more work on anyone’s desk. 

If you want to learn more about how Dream Rate functions, we recently published an explainer. Or if you’re ready to test-drive it for yourself, book a demo with us today. We can show you just how easy it is to cross off every item on your refinance monitoring checklist.  

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