How to Stop Losing Past Client Deals Before It’s Too Late

Have you ever missed out on past clients next purchase, re-fi, or an investment deal? Simply because you don't know they're back in the market. That feeling of opportunity lost is all too common with loan officers. Most lenders are leaving future business on the table, not because of bad service, but because they're not showing up when it matters most. Hey, you're listening to the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast where we help mortgage professionals close more loans with less effort. If you don't know who I am, my name is Jeff Zimfer. I'm author of Instant Referrals for Mortgage Professionals and Disruptor Die, How to Survive and Thrive, the digital real estate shift. Today on the show, we're asking, how do you stay top of mind with past clients without relying on labor and sense of follow-up or losing the personal touch to automation? To help us answer that, we're joined by Andrew Penner, co-founder of mylow.ai. It's a platform purpose built to help loan officers turn databases into deal flow while keeping the human connection intact. In this episode, we're gonna learn three primary things. By 82% of your clients never return to you and how to stop that churn, how behavioral intent signals can reveal which past clients are ready to transact with you before they hit the open market and the delicate balance between automation and authenticity in today's AI-driven world. We'll also dig into how companies like Rocket Mortgage are working to own the entire funnel and what you can do to compete with them. So if you're ready to learn the strategies to get more business from your past client database, stick around for this episode of mortgage marketing radius. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to jump right into it today and talk about, you know, this, this platform got to be honest, wasn't on my radar until you and I connected and I'm going to allow you to give the, you know, the executive summary definition of what is Milo, what problem does it help solve? Sure. Yeah. And the roots of it kind of go back to my days on the lending side. So I used to run marketing and some other functions for a high growth mortgage lender at a Connecticut. And, you know, a big thing that I think a lot of lenders have dealt with whether really aggressively and painfully like I did or even silently is the problem of customer churn. You know, we work so hard to get these customers in the door, whether it's through agent referrals or whether, you know, I also manage consumer direct for a, for that lender and, you know, you're paying $2,000, $3,000 in acquisition, call us per closed deal. And that's okay. You can make money on that if you price the loan right and if you're handling comp well. But then we would just let this repeat business slip through the cracks and we were disciplined. We were really strong with what we did, you know, as an example, would do a, had a mandate where we have to send a mass email every two weeks to at least a segment of our database, touching every customer about every six to eight weeks. And that worked really well. In the year that I left, we originated three billion, about 500 million of that was marketing assisted production, but we couldn't rest on our laurels and the thing that drove me crazy was when I would have loan officers come to me for price concessions because their customer went to their bank first and they got a half a percent lower. Or we'd see, you know, our credit monitoring, we'd see an alert pop up and that customer had already gotten a right quote from Rocket. Now we're in it with Rocket, right? Or we get a reply to those mass emails and somebody says, sorry, I already refinanced. Those kind of things drive you crazy because you worked so hard to cultivate this database for most loan officers. I think if you asked them their biggest asset, maybe besides the realtor portfolio would be their closed loan portfolio. And if you asked them to wait it, it'd probably be like 60% realtor and 40% closed loan. But we constantly fall short on appropriately nurturing that closed loan database. And you know, what kind of pushed me over the edge? I had used tools like Homebot, I had used tools like Home IQ. And what pushed me over the edge was we were turning customers and I saw that we were not alone. 82% of customers use a different mortgage lender on their next transaction. And so when you look at that, there's clearly a systemic problem that wasn't being addressed by the solutions out there. And so to more directly answer your question, we did a few things differently when we launched my loan. Because we wanted the loan officer and the lender to be front and center. It's not Homebot branded, it's not Home IQ branded, right? It is, I set you up with home value reports from my company, whether I'm from Fairway, Movement, Total Mortgage, or any other lender, right? And I am featured front and center throughout the entire experience. The second thing was, you know, I always agreed philosophically with what those tools brought to the table, but we wanted to close the loop as well as we opened it. I think those platforms do a great job. And I give a ton of praise to Homebot and Home IQ for what they do. They do a great job of opening the loop with the customer, getting me interested, okay, wow, I have, you know, my home's worth this much, I have this much equity. That's great. Now what, right? And I can mess around with some calculations there. But with Milo, we bring that opportunity back to the lender. We're tracking over 40 different behavioral signals within the experience that we provide, which is, you know, home value reports, white label home search site, and a bunch of really great tools and calculators and things like that. But we're also tracking what that customer does across the web. So now we have this change with trigger legislation, right? I think Katie Swiney and a bunch of people have done a great job of lobbying and honestly helping customers more than anyone, but making it so now, you know, there's much tighter restrictions around how we monitor credit and how trigger leads are sold. And we need to be able to get to the customer before that event happens. So what we see with Milo is the alerts that we're sending to the loan officer and to the lender through CRM are coming about six to eight weeks before that credit is pulled. So it's no longer, I mean, the checkout aisle. And then I grabbed a snickers and now somebody from Reese's is like, hold on, hold on, wait, you should grab a Reese's, right? Because I might have already seen, hey, the snickers is half the price, right? I've already sold myself, even if Reese is my favorite candy, now I've sold myself on snickers and they're trying to win me back instead of being there when I needed them in the first place. So we help build that relationship. We give the loan officer the information they need to turn it truly into a relationship and not just a transactional occurrence. So in our case, we integrate with just about every CRM. We do it deeply. It's bidirectional. You close a loan, comes into our system in real time. Loan officer leaves, you can update that and reassign the loans in real time in our system. A customer engages, you get that interaction alert right in CRM, a report is generated, will give you the underlying data in CRM. So it's this perfectly bidirectional system, no login needed and just hits loan officers where they are. And I think it's important to know your audience that way as well. Yeah, there's a lot in there. I mean, what's coming up for me is, you know, of Mr. Cooper and of course, of Redfin. And so they are definitely going all in on top of funnel activities, not only top of funnel, but actually obviously through the other acquisitions there, through middle and bottom, right? So I mean, it looks like they're trying to own the entire funnel, right? They are. And it's a smart play. I give them their flowers. I think they're also using it to their advantage on the TPO side as well, through RocketPro, using Redfin to generate some leads there. And yeah, that's a smart company. They know what they're doing. They are one of the few lenders who buck the trend of customer, you know, poor customer retention, right? They do a great job retaining the past client database, but a lot of what they do even is through just pure labor, right? Reaching out to those customers, they have a ton of, you know, people dialing out on those clients. Yeah. And that's important. The question is just what approach do you take as a lender? And I think each lender needs to feel that out for themselves. Yeah. And then I think that's where to like, my little can come in from what I understand of it is, you know, getting back to some of what you just described, intent monitoring, right? Client engagement, you know, if we're, if we're to be in the same ballpark, has somebody like a rocket who's, who's, you know, got that share of customer because they've made those investments throughout the funnel. The question then becomes, you know, is, is what do we do? How do we maintain our database? You know, I talked to a law officer the other day, we had them in our small group community. Wade bets if you're listening, shout out to you. So Wade, I think he said 65% of his business comes from his past clients. And that is a rare number. Most L.O.s cannot say that. That is true. That's incredible. It's very incredible. No, and especially knowing that in his career thus far, he's funded over 800 million and loans, but he's very methodical. He's very used to word labor intensive. He's doing the annual financial reviews. He's doing the actual birthday calls, you know, those, those different labor intensive things. And what I'm excited about with AI and looks like your integration of and use of AI and different milestones and intent monitoring is that shouldn't we be able to streamline or to a degree, rely on a platform to help us stay top of mind. So it's not necessarily always manual labor. Yeah. I think that's really important. And you know, I haven't figured out the right way, you know, on a personal level. I think it's hard when you talk about AI and what that follow up can do. Because I think there's a massive unlock there in the future. The challenge you have is, you know, I try to use this letmas test and it's probably flawed. But, you know, would I do it, for example, with my friends or with my wife, right? Because ultimately that's the kind of relationship we want to have with our past clients, with our agents and the people who are really important in our sphere of influence. And to trust that all to AI, I think you risk taking the personal part out of the relationship, right? I'm all for AI and leads, for example, I think that's great. There's no preexisting relationship with our past client database is sacred. And so we've been really careful to walk that line cautiously in Milo. And one of the, you know, I think the biggest thing that we can do is I focused less on the conversational piece and more on what value can we provide, right? Even in my conversations with my wife, there's value additive things that I can do, right? Or with my friends. And so in this case, what do people care about? Well, you've just helped them with the biggest transaction they will probably make in their life until maybe the next house they buy, right? It's for most people where most of your net worth is tied up in. And they have, they don't have great ways to track that value. I mean, you can use Zilla, right? But we all dog on Zilla and for good reason. But at the same time, that's a decent estimate of value, right? But it only gives you part of the equation. The next step and what we can do to provide value to our customers is, hey, we have revolving that at an all time high rates are starting to come down. How can you make smart financial decisions with your equity to get liquidity that you might need to just make your life better? And putting those numbers, it doesn't make sense for a loan officer to prepare that full analysis. I love, you know, mortgage coach, for example, but I'm not going to put a total cost analysis together for every client in my database, right? But you can get a ton of leverage with tools like Milo to be able to automate that part of the conversation and then open up genuine conversations as a result. And I think that's where we hang best. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a great point is we don't want to automate the relationship away. And I always go back to, you know, a quote that I heard a while back, which was the most human company will win. And especially in this day at age with AI and deep fakes and people questioning, is it real or not? Hey, are you tired of cold calling realtors and feeling like you're getting nowhere? With my agent classes, you don't have to chase agents anymore. We hand you a done-for-you system of ready-to-teach presentations, plug-and-play marketing, and even 200 producing agents to invite. So you can double your agent referrals in 90 days or less. Plus, you'll get weekly coaching and a community of loan officers sharing exactly what's working right now. Here's a quick win from one of our members. I joined it because I was tired of doing business the way that regular loan officers have been doing it in my market, which is just making the core calls every Monday and Friday, check anyone with real estate agents. I had done that for years and seemed like everybody was doing that. I needed something different. And I wanted to find a way that I could work with the agents that I want to work with. I wanted to find a way that I could have a captive audience every month, every couple weeks, where I could find agents that were like-minded and that wanted to work with me as well. So it's probably brought in, I'm just guessing here, but it's probably brought on in the three years I've been back with the program. It's probably brought on. I'd probably say about $40 million in volume since then, right? And it's led us some massive relationships. And I wouldn't be able to do those things without this program. The value of these Friday calls are so incredibly valuable for all of us. I get upset if I miss it on a Friday. The cost of this program is worth it just because of these Friday calls that we're on, where we help coach each other. We're just here to help each other add value to our real estate partners. Are you ready to stop chasing and start attracting agent referrals on demand? Book a call at mortgagedmarketing.pro or hit the link in the show notes. Now back to our show. Do you think that would you agree that people the rare, the actual conversation like this, whether it's over the phone or whatever, but the actual interaction, there's a time and a place for AI and AI voice and all that. But where do you think what would you advise a loan officer or how have you structured or designed Milo to make sure that that human interaction is still part of it? Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm long on AI. I think one thing that we can rely pretty heavily on is that AI is going to get better and better every six months, right? You have kind of, what was it, Moore's Law with computing that was years and years of every 18 months, computing power would double. I think we're in a place where every six to 12 months AI is doubling in power and in what it can handle. I mean, we're probably maybe it's sensationalism, but we might be within a few years of basically super intelligence, not sorry, not general intelligence, not super intelligence, but a place where AI can probably start to have those conversations in a way that you would when it learns enough about you. Right now, in its current state, it's still a little fallible, right? It's still prone to hallucinations. It's still going to say some things that are not authentic no matter how much training data you give it. But I do think as that technology evolves and as we as lenders, I think a big thing for lenders is starting to structure your data and your database for an age of AI. And what I mean by that, for example, is they need to get to know your customers. So how much customer data are you storing? What is the breadth of that data? How accessible is it? And also your loan officers, how much data do we have? Are we recording conversations? Are we making sure that we have good structure to how our emails are logged and managed? So that that can eventually be fed into these algorithms and be used as training data to be able to really get to that next level of personal connection. Because you've probably seen AI in some cases is better at rebuttals than people now. And I think that's a good jumping off point. Rebuttals is probably the easier of the things to mimic versus a genuine human relationship. But still, it's getting there. And so in due time, it will be there. And if you don't invest in it now, I think now is a good time, but if you don't invest in it now, I think structuring yourselves for that investment down the road to make sure you make the most of it is going to be mission critical. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see the use cases. It's going to vary based on company and what their what their head count is internally. Like, you know, thinking back to our conversation about rocket. I mean, there is an argument to be made that they could scale back on some of their call center because AI might help the streamline some of those opportunities to to identify what points they are at what stage in that readiness. Because I think one obvious use case of AI is to tee up the the client and the conversation to once it identifies that's at a stage ready to talk to a human. That's the time to hand it off. And right now, there's probably a lot of human interaction that will be eventually handled by AI because it's more efficient streamline. And it's not a customer experience burn in most cases. Would you kind of agree with that? Yeah, I think so. We'll probably end up seeing a bit of a bifurcation in the market too, at least temporarily. Where you're going to find some organizations and you're right, company size is definitely a factor. But I also think there are some small companies that can get massive unlock from the efficiencies of AI. And it's really interesting because you've we've seen this trend as business has been harder to come by of consolidation. And it'll be really interesting. You know, you have some democratization happening from UWM and rocket bringing life into the broker world again, which I think is healthy. And it's going to be interesting to watch over the next few years how there will be different strategies, right? There's going to be some people who get an enormous amount of leverage with AI. There's also going to be some loan officers who can get just who can be that personal relationship, right? We as people crave that personal connection. And so there's going to be the efficiency play versus the human play. All right, well, let's let's do this. Before we hit record, we were talking about right now in the market, we're seeing some favorable headwinds finally, which is likely a reduction in the interest rates. We're already seeing some movement on that probably further movement. And so we're going to open up this new pool of potential buyers. Maybe some people might be somewhat of a market for refies out there. But let's just say this, I'm a loan officer listening right now. I don't have a platform right now that optimizes my engagement with my database, right? Through a financial digest, through property searches, and all the various things that you guys do on your platform, which we'll put a link in the show notes, which it's mymylo.ai. That's m-y-m-i-l-o.ai. Link in the show notes if you want to go check it out. But if I'm a loan officer and I don't, and I haven't done a good job of nurturing and staying top of mind with my past client database, I want to prep for potential opportunities coming in 2026. What would you advise? I mean, could it be that I can take my database and upload it to mylo, like tomorrow, and I can start building some of that future business? A hundred percent. Yeah, we have a super easy onboarding process. We take a lot of care and how we do it. And yeah, if you have your database in good shape, and if you don't, by the way, that's order of business number one, right? Make sure you have that database in good shape, because it's going to be a awesome one. I mean, think about, you know, I know most people don't use the CRM. It's amazing if you did, right? But even just having a spreadsheet of your past clients, I know some of the best loan officers I know, just track their people in a Google sheet. And that's fine, right? As long as you have it in some sort of organized format, where you can measure it and you can structure it, right, because you can't manage what you can't measure. And so if you're just flying by the seat of your pants, you're not going to maximize your potential. So that's order of business number one. But once you do have that, there's a ton of great platforms, right? I would make sure you do some credit monitoring. If you don't do it, you know, if you don't have a system through your company, which most companies do, you could use a system like stick them. They're a great platform for individual loan officer credit monitoring. I would look at, you know, what kind of platforms can I use to get alerts from across the web, but looking at mylo specifically, we immediately will start engaging about 70% of your customers every month. Just because people, again, it's value-added of content, right? People want to see these home value reports. They want to check out their equity in the home. You're going to see generally around one and a half to three and a half percent of those people reaching out to you, or at least being observed as high intent actors through our system. Our job is to skim the cream off the top of your database. You talk about time before, right? There's unlock that comes with AI in terms of automating conversation. There's also unlock that comes from having the right platform do some of that pre-filtering for you. You can look at your potential deals in your pipeline as needles in the haystack, right? Platforms like mylo are the super magnet that allow you to kind of pull them out without much effort. And then we're also, you know, something we don't talk as much as we probably should about is we track customer interactions across the web as well. And so it's not just what occurs on the home value reports we send, the tools that we send, the white labeled home search site that we have for each loan officer and letter on our platform. But it's also, what if that customer goes to XYZ comparison shopping site and looks at a mortgage renautical? It fills out a form or, you know, saves a home on a top home search site. We get that data back and we're letting the lender know and it's not our best guess at predicting, you know? It's a, we believe that loan officers are competent professionals and if properly equipped with the right data about their customers, they're going to know who to reach out to and what to say. And so our job is to figure out how do we skin the cream off the top of that database, give them the most effective way that they can spend an hour or two in their week to make sure that they're maximizing their chances. Because I don't know if you saw Jeff, I think it was ICE recently put out some numbers that 25% I think they did a survey of homeowners and 25% of homeowners plan to refinance or tap into their home's equity over the next year. So if you have a database of a thousand loans, that's 250 loans potentially up for grabs. In that same study, they said that in Q1, I think less than 25% were retained by lenders. So you have this kind of rule of 25. 25% of my database is now high opportunity, but I'm going to retain less than 25% of it, use platforms like Milo, like Sticum, like even Redder, you know, to be able to make sure you maximize the loyalty from those customers. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I think that's very, very important. We need to stay top of mind, right? Be present throughout the funnel as much as possible. You know, that's, I guess that's part of the challenge today, though, too, is like we need to quote be everywhere, right? That it's includes online and social media and have a Google business profile. It can be very overwhelming for modern mortgage professional. No doubt. Yeah, hopefully, in a lot of cases, I know a lot of good companies will help with that. So if you haven't reach out to your company's marketing department, see if they can help you, right? But if not, I mean, I've done this, you know, I did this, I had my own marketing consulting firm before I came into the mortgage industry. And it's really not that hard, right? It's overwhelming. I think that's a great way to put it. But once you say, okay, I'm going to sit down. I'm going to commit to doing this. It starts to become a lot clearer. You can create that Google My Business page. You know, it's a one shot thing. There's platforms like YXT out there that can even help create a bunch of listings at once, right? Contents a whole different story that requires a lot of discipline. But you have some great episodes on your podcast about that that I definitely think people should listen to. So what do you think for people who have listed this so far? And maybe, like we said, you know, maybe they've been on another platform. Maybe they haven't or maybe they were in the past. And they're not currently on one. They're kind of orphaned out there. And they don't really have a database, you know, reactivation awareness platform or system. This sounds like a softball, but I would assume. It's like, hey, go check mylo.ai out, right? I mean, what else would you want to say to anybody listening? Yeah, I would say now is the time to do it, right? I just mentioned, I mean, we're about to see if these people who are a heck of a lot smarter than me are correct about the market. We're about to see probably the biggest boom we've had since COVID. And so I don't blame the people that, you know, have waited and are, you know, pulling back. Gosh, if I was a lender, for example, you know, if I had the choice between getting a new piece of software or keeping an employee that whose family depends on me, like, I'm going to try and do the latter, right? But now I think we're starting to see the industry is turning a corner. The market is turning a corner. It probably won't be nearly as rapid, but as it was prior. But now is the time to make those investments, because you want to give yourself some time to percolate adoption through your organization, to warm up your past client database and make sure that you're filtering through, like, really getting to the relationship part of that life cycle. Yeah. And so yeah, I would definitely, I'm biased, but check out my Milo. See what we can do and look at some other options as well, because I really think at the end of the day, every person's business is different. They have to figure out where the gaps in their personal strategy are and what works best for them. But I think we've worked hard with a lot of empathy for loan officers to find a solution that can work for just about everyone. Yeah, and that's why I wanted to bring you to my audience here today, because of awareness is like, people need to know what's out there for choices. And so I think this is another great opportunity for anybody listening that feels like this might be a fit. Check it out, dig further. I don't get anything for this, other than my job is to make sure you guys are staying top of the heap when it comes to modern mortgage originator. I hate to use that word, but that's what we have. But to really just help you be a better loan officer, and for me, it comes down to people process and technology. And this is one of those opportunities for you to leverage a tech stack. That's going to help you capture more of that future business. So I'm glad we're able to connect and chat about this. Likewise, thanks for having me, Jeff. Yeah, and listeners, once again, I'll put a link in the show notes. Plus I'll put a link and you're okay with it to your LinkedIn. So people can connect with you on LinkedIn there as well. But hey, if you like today's episode, check the link in the show notes, leave us a review, and we'll see you guys on the next one. Bye for now. Okay, that's it for today's episode. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to remind you about my agent classes, your proven system to double your agent referrals in just 90 days. Imagine never having to co-call again, instead building real lasting relationships with top-producing agents who want to send you business. With done-for-you presentations, marketing automation, weekly coaching, it's all designed to make growing your business easier and fun. So if you're ready to take control of your agent referrals and grow your income, visit mortgagemarketing.pro or check the link in the show notes. And while you're there, don't forget to check out the success stories from other mortgage pros who've already seen incredible results. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.