Ep #68: How to Automate Your Pre-Approval Letters

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Mortgage Marketing Radio Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey listeners, Jeff Zinfer. Welcome to another episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. I hope this episode finds you doing well. I know I'm doing much better back in full swing from this respiratory infection, got my Z-pack and I'm rocking and rolling, got my voice back. And I'm so thrilled to bring you our special guests here today, which are none other than Jeremy Williams, the founder and CEO of Stead Key and special guest, Sam Fanon, your mortgage man with premiere nationwide lending. What are we talking about here today? We're talking about a really cool tool that helps you automate your approval letters. How often are you frustrated and challenged with having to update approval letters, having to log into your clunky system when you're not in front of a computer and maybe your mobile version of that doesn't work too well? How often are realtors frustrated because they got to contact you on weekends or nights to give an updated approval letter because the prices change, negotiations of change terms and so forth. If you're looking for a cool way to alleviate you from a lot of that low ROI producing work, low dollar value work of just updating some basic numbers and a pre-approval letter and having to reissue that multiple times in a week or a month, well, Stead Key could just be the right solution for you as you'll hear about from our two guests today. It's a matter of fact, you'll hear from Sam who has been able to leverage Stead Key in such a way that it's allowed him to grow his business. Sam's already a $30 million producer, as a matter of fact, you'll hear his story about how Stead Key has helped him raise his loan volume, grow his loan production and has helped him be more successful in partnering with agents, grabbing their attention and adding value to their business, earning more referrals. So Stead Key's a really cool system for those of you that are listening on the audio. There is a portion in which we do have kind of a video representation of Stead Key to see the dashboard and so forth, but you'll hear at the end is that you'll want to go check out more at Stead Key.com. That's STED Key.com. Hey, Jerry and Sam, welcome to the show. Hey Jeff, how you doing? I am doing fantastic. Thanks for being here. Let's do this for the listeners. Let's identify who's who people know who I am by now. I hope. Jerry, why don't you tell the listeners who you are, what you do, and then Sam will come to you. Yeah, my name is Jerry Williams and I'm the founder of Stead Key and I was a loan originator and I built this system for myself and we've gotten a lot, had a lot of success with it and had a lot of loan officers have a lot of success with it and so, but Bill is from an originator's point of view located in Dallas, Texas and been in the business around 13 years. So that's me. Awesome. Hey Sam, what's up? Who are you? Sam being in over here at Premier Nationwide lending your favorite mortgage man. I have been using Stead Key ever since Jerry created it and it has changed my business and my life forever. So just a little bit of a background, I have tried all of the different platforms out there. I can't name names. I want to get anybody, you know, upset, but of all the different platforms, CRM systems, you name it in mortgage business. Stead Key is the one that was a game changer for me. It simplified my life and my business partner's lives. So that's just a little bit about me and I mean forever loyal to Stead Key. Love it. Okay, so let's clarify then because you mentioned something there about CRM's, etc. Sam and let's clarify Jerry, you might want to take this on what exactly Stead Key is. What does it do? Yeah. So Stead Key, we do a number of different things and there's one feature in particular that we released first. So I built the system for myself and I built like a kind of a beginner beta version and I got such great feedback on it that I decided to make it a more robust platform that we could, you know, do bigger banks and add multiple users. But in using kind of the full thing that I created, which was, you know, milestones and loan app and doc center and, you know, this approval letter deal that we built. And so one of the things that the Realtors just loved was the ability to generate a letter anytime they needed an approval letter. And in our market here in Dallas, it's so hot that, you know, you might have five or 10 offers going in on a house and it's really competitive. And so anyway, what our tool does is it allows us a real killer. We build parameters and the Realtor can just quickly go in and type in the offer they're going to make in generate a letter. So that's kind of the main thing that we released first. We've also got some features that have recently come out that are really cool, a little bit different and more marketing focused, again, towards Realtors. But anyway, that's what our system does. And it's, so it's not necessarily CRM, but it's something that will help grow your business because it'll attract Realtors. Okay. So Sam, back to you for second. Let's, let's talk about what attracted you to Steadkey. How are you using it in your business to, let's say, tell me more about like, are you using it to be able to attract and capture Realtors to provide a better kind of user experience? How do you use it? So there was actually three main things that attracted me to it. I, you know, ever since coming into the business, I've been trying to think, okay, well, what will make me different? What will set me apart from other loan officers in my area? So with Steadkey, it was one of those things, like Jerry said, we're in a very, very competitive market at home, you know, gets listed. There could be 10, 20 offers within 24 hours. Agents are usually showing properties in the evenings or on the weekends. And so the number one thing that led me to Steadkey was, hey, these agents can generate those this letter 24 seven. So if it's 11 o'clock at night, they don't feel like fathering me, they can generate the letter to match their offer and submit it without wasting any time. Same thing if I'm in a meeting or on a podcast call, like this, they can go in and generate a letter, so they're not losing any time. That was huge to them as a selling tool to these real estate agents. Most of the time, they're waiting on their lenders to get the letters. Well, now they don't have to. They're working with a loan officer that sets the parameters after approval. Then they can go in and generate the letter, whatever they want. So the second thing that I really loved is I was constantly crunching numbers from my customers. Well, with Steadkey, the customers, as they're going in and generating letters, they can crunch the numbers and know what their load amount is, what their total monthly payment is, and what their cash to close is. And it's nearly spot on from what I would tell them they were to call me. So it's saving time right there for me generating letters for agents, saving time for me running numbers for the customers. And then lastly, it's just giving me a better way of living life with my family. I am not sitting here doing these free approval letters throughout the day or late at night or running numbers for customers. So it's really taken a lot off my plate and handed it over to the ones that really want to do it themselves anyways. Yeah, that's awesome. Give you a bit of a quality of life back. I'm curious though, when you first considered, you know, opening the Camono, giving the keys to a realtor or a borrower on printing, creating their own approval letters, was there some reluctance to do that? No, there wasn't. And I'm a control freak. And with Steadkey, we set our own parameters. So just as if I'm doing a normal pre-approval and I'm setting the parameters telling the customer, hey, qualify for up to 250, 3% down on a conventional loan, I'm setting those parameters. So on one screen of Steadkey, we set those same parameters. And if they happen to go over their limit, say taxes are higher or they're just trying to push the limits, it will not let them generate a letter. So it completely takes that anxiety factor out from me because I know if they're in there messing with it, it's something that I've set and it's in the workup front. So they can't alter the letters the way that they load, they can't change verbiage nothing in there. So it's, we have 100% control. And if there is a customer that's tight on debt's income and you don't necessarily feel like you want to allow them to automate it, you can click a box in there to email you and you can manually approve it. So he is thought of everything. Well, that's cool. So you can kind of get that last point of review and approval to make sure it's in line with you, but being the professional. Absolutely. So on that, like with my free approvals, I try to keep my customers well under the debt to income ratio max. So you will have that customer that you know, wants to go up to another 5,000 in sales price and they have room to do it. I can go in there and manually change. I can even do it on my phone in less than a couple minutes. So we do have, you know, the parameters are set in there to where they're just not running wild with these pre-approval letters. It's not going to get me in trouble on the back end. So tell me about the conversations you have with the real estate agents and getting them to adopt this. Because I know there's varying levels of either understanding or tech savvy or, you know, I mean, I'm just curious about when you present this to agents, hey, I'm going to give you the ability to generate your own, you know, approval letters. What are some of the responses you get? Absolutely. So I teach several, I've taught several classes on Steki recently. And at the end of the class, these agents are coming to me. I mean, just flocking to me. It's amazing because they love the fact that, again, they have the control to generate that letter 24-7. So late at night, or if I'm in a meeting, or if I'm with family, they have that control. And these agents, honestly, they get asked by their customers often, okay, well, what would my payment be on this house? The same questions they're asking us. Well, the agents can actually run the numbers in there as well and tell them, you know, here's at this surprise home, here's what your payment is, and here's what your cash to close is. So in going through and teaching this class, when Jerry created Steki, he kept saying over and over again, keeping it simple. Steki is very, very simple and user-friendly. Even, you know, I'm a millennial, I'll handful my agents are millennials, so they can jump in and they use it, you know, they just learned it real quick. Even the ones like our mother's an agent, and she's been in business a long time, and she even can use it at ease, since it's very good. It passed the Sam's mother's test, huh? Jerry knows it really well, and so she can do it, anyone can do it. That's awesome. So the class, tell me about this class, you teach a class that's just on Steki, what's the name of it? Tell me more. It's on Steki. So we pull up the screen and we go through it step by step, I show these agents, you know, here's what it looks like on this stage, here's what it looks like, and if the screen's up, I'll show you. Yeah, we can switch it. If you guys want to start doing the screen portion for those that are listening, we've got a video portion to this as well, the link to it will be in the show notes, so you can check out some of the screen share we're going to do right now. Yes, so one thing, Jeff, this is Jerry, I'm just going to point out, like, so one of the things that we can do is we can brand this and make it look like your company's tool. And so you can see, you know, if you look here, where Sam's going to log in, it's got his company's info, it's called Premiere Proof Proof, it's 24 or 7, and then you know, just to clarify, so a user would see that, be a borrower or a realtor, they see that brand of experience. Yeah, when a realtor logs in or gets an invitation and a buyer, when they click on that link, it's and create their password, it's going to take them here and it's going to look like, you know, your company's sort of deal. So we also have it, you can use Stead Key and we have one off loan officers that will use it, but this is our branded version, and we have the ability. Yeah, it looks like I'm logging into something provided by Sam's company. Yep, absolutely. So when I'm in the class is I start on this screen and what I just asked the agent's first is, would you like to generate your own Premiere Proof of letters? How many of you go, what do you mean, Generate Mountain Pre-improveable? Just look on their face, and then they all raise their hands because they're like, yeah, I want to generate it my own letters. I want to recognize you from the equation. Exactly. They're typing up the offers. Why not be generating the letter to match that offer? When you submit a clean off from the letters matching, it just makes that look a lot more presentable to the list agent. So when I'm teaching, I just simply ask them that to kind of, you know, get them to understand, okay, there's a tool out here that allows me to do that. So we start on this page and we, you know, we'll log in and then I'll just take them to a specific customer and we'll go through there and basically you see at the top there's three little pieces. There's overview, there's pre-approval parameters and then there's house approval. The two fields that the agents and the customers can see is the overview one and then the house approval. So on the overview, you have the two buyers, you have your loan officer and then you have your real estate agent and you can, as you can see, you can customize and put your headshot in there. Most of my real estate agents have their headshot in there and it's good for us because that way when the customers are constantly seeing our faces and, you know, that just builds rapport with them as well. So then you can go to the pre-approval parameters and that's where the loan officer, myself, is setting the parameters. I mean, various thought of everything. You're put in an automated, do they have a homeless contingency, a charging discount point, what are the closing costs, sales price, loan type, you have to even put their credit score in there. So it can factor in MI. You put it in the interest rates. That's one thing, you know, as rates are changing right now, we have to constantly go back in there and update the rates to make sure that the approval letters are working. So then when you're on the house approval, which is this screen that we're looking at now, this is the screen that the agents and the buyers can see. So they can go in and they can type in, here's what we're going to offer. Here's how much we're putting down. Here's what the annual taxes are. Here's what the annual HOA views are. Are we asking for seller concessions? And as you can see on the right side, it'll start saying approved. It'll pop up a loan amount. The estimated monthly payment and the estimated cash to close. So that's what the borrower is really looking at. It also helps the agent sound more educated when they're talking to the customer. Here's your payment. Here's your cash to close. And then the bottom right is where you can click on generate the approval letter. And it's done right then in there. It's silly. So it's just, you know, I will bring up that letter. Yeah, so I want to see. Yeah, and so they can download this. Yeah, you can download this. We can customize this so we can take your letterhead, whatever your language is, and we can build like a custom template however you want to do it. So there's a number of different things we can do. And then the realtor can just download the letter here. Yeah, well, I like I just want to point out at the top again for that branding there it is right there. So it is an official, you know, it's on the branded letterhead from the company. So it looks nice and professional. It doesn't look like some of those computer print out letters that I've seen with the career font, you know, which is clearly generating a machine. It's not so pretty, but this has looked really nice. It just shows sales price, loan amount, the whole line yards, and so a realtor or a borrower can generate that. The borrower cannot generate the letter. It's a realtor's appreciator. The realtor's got that's that way there in the mix. They need a letter. They need a realtor. Right. So I think the point there is, look, you got to go through one of us right to stay involved in the transaction. Absolutely. Okay. That way we have complete control. So the realtor's just, you know, absolutely fall over this. So like, going back to it, when I ask them, how would you like to generate your own free approval letter? Once I show them this, they're just blown away. So you don't ever get the realtor's or like, you know what, man, no, I don't have time to be logging into this thing. That's your job. I have never run into one realtor because as they're sitting there typing up the letter, you can see how quickly they can type up this free approval letter to. It's actually quicker for them to do this than to email me or call me and wait, you know, a couple minutes for me to do it. And just to, you know, one of the things that when I initially built this, I had an agent that, you know, wasn't big on technology and, and, you know, I was like, you know, it's fine just tell me what you need and I can get the letter. And so as a loan officer, if you had somebody that didn't, you know, didn't want to use, didn't want to log in or whatever like a realtor didn't want to log in, they can text you or call you or whatever. And you can hop on your phone from anywhere and hit generate and then just hit send to everyone and it emails everybody the letter. So it's still fast. If, you know, if you don't have a computer or whatever, you always have your phone with you. So is there a phone app then that you download? You know, there's not. I had one and nobody used it. The realtor's when they're drawing up contracts are typically on their computer. And the way we built the front end, it conforms to any device that you're on and it works really well and looks good. So we just took the app down because it wasn't getting used and we didn't want to deal with, you know, having to go through Apple every time we upgrade any code or whatever. So there's not an app that we really don't, you really don't need one. Okay, Sam. So tell me about how this has helped you to in your, you know, marketing to attracting realtors, getting them to become referral partners. So when I meet with agents, say I'm, you know, targeting and wanting to work with a specific agent, a lot of loan officers will go and they'll sit down and they'll say, they'll start talking about products and the agents don't really care about the products. So when I sit down, I talk about my systems that I have in place. I always go through all the different systems and from start to finish, of how I work with my customers, how my team works with my customers. And then at the very end, I just ask them, hey, would you like to generate your own pre-approval letters? And again, you get that look on their face. And so I'm like, okay, well, let's schedule an appointment so I can show you this pre-approval portal that I have. And we go through that. And basically, they just fall in love with it. And so at that point, they're willing to give me a chance. And then once I get, you know, show them steadies, set their pre- their customer on pre-approval, they fall in love with Stecky. Then when the loan comes in for processing and underwriting, I knock it out of the park there. So it's Stecky is a huge tool right at the beginning to start to talk to these new agents that you want to work with. First is talking about loan products and programs. I mean, it's just it's a different way to look at it and you have to kind of step back and think, what would the real estate agent want? Just like Jerry said, he created this for the real estate agents. Yeah, well, I think it's a great differentiator to your point in that the realtor, of course, any smart realtor is going to want to have excellent customer experience and you being a lender, right? You're part of that customer experience. So I could definitely see where you're having a conversation about Stecky and let me show you, you know, what a great user experience we provide to your customers, Mr. Realtor, in that, right? How about if we could, like you say, right, enable, you know, or streamline the process of getting, you know, loan approval letters turned around for you, like in a matter of minutes, especially in this market, which you've alluded to earlier, Sam, which is, you know, we've got lots of different pricing, multiple bid offers, people come in and, you know, up their offer, change terms, et cetera. Yeah, I would think anybody or any realtor would be like, yeah, if you could help me do that, that helps me streamline and be more efficient and it's kind of a, I always like to add that, you know, give to the realtor some scripting around. So why should you list with me? Why should you, you know, buy with me not only am I a great agent for all these other reasons, but hey, you know, we make the process very efficient for you because my lender, right? blah, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. 100%. Okay. So what can you tell me about some of the, the new things coming down the pipe for Steadkey then, in addition to this awesome, loan approval streamline process here? Yeah, so Jeff, we also, one of the other things obviously that realtor's care about is milestone updates. And so we've got a really easy milestone update, deal where, you know, it updates everybody, keeps everybody in the loop as to what's going on. So we also have a loan app where, you know, that's 3.2, you know, compliant. So it, it, it integrates really easily with whatever system you're on. And we've got a loan app. We've got milestones. We have a document center. And the way we've got our document center set, it just looks really good. It's, it's, again, it's just simple. The interface and it's, people just know what to do. You don't really have to coach anybody on that. And then we've also got some marketing things that we're doing. And like I said, I always think about the realtor. And your realtor really doesn't care about your loan app. They don't care about your document center. But what they do care about is, you know, is they care about the milestones. They like getting the updates. And then they love the pre approval thing. They love being able to get answers and get what they need whenever they need it. But we've also come up with a concept that is allows us to market with a realtor. And so we have a way to kind of connect you with your realtor through these links that we've made that allows you to connect with them and market. Like if you want to do some marketing on Facebook or if you want to give them a link, put on their website or whatever that connects you together. And so when a client clicks on it, it brings buyers straight into the system and shows the realtor and you together and just makes for a really cool way to onboard and market and bring in new buyers. So there's a lot you can do with that. We've got a lot of different ideas around that. But I did some testing with direct marketing the buyers. And it's not super effective. But if you have marketing with a realtor and they're endorsing what you're doing, I found that somewhere that video would get shared. And then somewhere in the download line, you'd find that it got you get a loan app. And so what we think is really cool is if we can say, hey, you're going to, when you post this on your Facebook realtor or Instagram or wherever, if this gets shared multiple times, then we're still going to know that you're the source of that, the source of where that came from. And so then you get the benefit of it. So anyway, so that's some of the stuff we're doing right now. We're rolling out. We've been rolling it out actually for just a number of weeks. We've been beta testing and all that. But it's working really well. And we're getting a lot of really positive feedback from the realtor's we're working with. Awesome. Well, I know obviously at the end here, we'll give listeners a way to contact you and to find out more about that and stead key. But before we wrap up, I wanted to ask Sam, right, the big question, which is everybody wants to know, tell me about your life, your business before and after stead key, you know, meaning has this helped you grow your volume and then has this freed you up right to spend more time working on generating more business instead of generating approval letters. Right. Absolutely. So I'll tell you this. I've only been in the business for years. I've been fortunate to add 10 million in production each and every year. And it was about middle of my second year when Jerry brought stead key out. And I was literally just bogged down. It doubled my business the next year at 10 million the next year and so on. So it's been a game changer for me, not only professionally, but personally as well. So essentially, Sam, what I heard you say is by adding stead key to your business, it's free you up to spend more time on the key, right, income generating activities of your business. Did I hear you say it added what doubled your business out of 10 million? What did it do? Stead key is a massive, massive, massive part of that success. So I mean, at one point, I was begging Jerry to not sell stead key each other lenders in my marketplace because it was that great for me. Yes, don't bring it to the competition. Yeah, I'm like sell it and see it all Florida or wherever, just not in Dallas. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Cool. So obviously when somebody's looking at stead key, you know, whether it's a loan officer or, you know, we've got different regionals and managers listening to this podcast as well. I assume Jerry that you work with compliance when necessary on this. Yeah, for sure. We've been through that a lot and we hadn't had any problems there because like I said, we can, we can literally just send me your letter. We make it look exactly like your current letter and, you know, we've got some pretty good sized groups that are using this and, you know, hundreds of, you know, one group I think has over a hundred loan off. Actually, they have a lot of loan officers, but they put, we've got about a hundred with them and obviously, you go through a lot of compliance departments, but because of the way we're doing it, compliance really is an issue. Hasn't been an issue with anybody. Okay. Well, tell you what, what for those that want to learn more about stead key, what's the best place for them to do that? How would they find you? The demo is pretty important. We really like to get everybody on a demo because we can help get your account set up just like you want it. And it takes about five to ten minutes to go through the demo, usually, usually less than ten. And you can go to our website, you can, you can register an account, but we encourage everybody to schedule a demo with this because we can, it doesn't take long and it'll make a big difference on key products. I can go over, you know, a few different ways to use this system to set up just different products. So yeah, absolutely. There's a video on your site as well. So once again, for listeners to learn more about stead key, pretty obvious, go to steadkey. That's st-e-a-d-k-e-y, steadkey.com. Swim around on there. Check out some of the cool testimonials. Watch the video. Most importantly, I think that makes sense to dive in and grab a demo. Of course, this video had a portion of a screen share to look at the dashboard and how easy it is to create this whole system and set it up to automate this whole, you know, loan approval letter generation system, which is really, really cool. So man, I got to love it. If I was still active in the field, I would definitely be using stead key because I think it's a really cool differentiator. Realtors obviously love it and freeze you up to spend more time working on the business instead of in the business. So hey guys, thank you so much. I know you're busy. We will put all the links to everything in the show notes and appreciate you guys being here. Thanks, Jeff. Yes, thank you, Jeff. All right, and for listeners, once again, I appreciate you. Hope you enjoyed this week's episode. If so, please leave us a little comment, a ranking, and we will see you on the next one. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to Mortgage Marketing Radio. One more truth in mortgage marketing. Get more free training and resources at MortgageMarketingInstitute.com. Hey guys, what's up real quick? 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