The Blueprint for Closing 575 Units per Year

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, listeners, what's up, Jeff Zimper. Welcome to this episode of the mortgage market radio podcast. Hey, question for you. Do you ever struggle with how to identify the right realtors to work with? Do you ever wonder, should you be working with the onesy-to-the agents or not? Well, my special guest today is going to answer that question for you. He knows what he's talking about because he closed to 575 units last year. So stay tuned because we get started in just one moment. All right, all right, all right, yes. So today we're talking all realtors and I'm really excited to bring my special guest on in just a moment. But before we do, seeing as we are talking about realtors, look, I know realtors can be a challenge to get attention, right, to get them to respond, to get them to send you referrals. It's a bit of a numbers game. Let's face it, you want to succeed with real estate agents, but you face all the challenges that every other loan officer faces in that they're tough to get its attention and response and they're quote, not loyal and whatever else you want to say about those real estate agents, but they're worth it because 89% of people still buy a house and use a realtor and folks purchase businesses where it's at, but you struggle to get the realtor attention. You struggle to add value to build referrals and relationships and you need a solution. Therefore, I want to take a moment and tell you about the mortgage marketing pro membership. In there, we have a platform called My Aging Classes. It is a turnkey plug and play done for you educational platform that allows you to attract agents at scale. What I mean by that is get more agent referrals in less time with no chasing, no co-calling, no begging, no pay to play. None of that. Imagine a completely turnkey library of high value, easy to deliver in person or virtual classes that you deliver and that we equip you with everything for that. A video, train the trainer of me showing you how to actually do the class. We give you the PowerPoint, the speaker notes, the transcript, we give you any handouts, we give you the social media images to promote. We even give you the emails and the text messages and use our marketing automation platform with landing pages branded for you with every single class so that you can build your own real estate agent database, increase your attendance, your conversions and conversations, and build your realtor referral business. Want to learn more? Go check out a brief video I put up. It's over at mortgagemarketing.pro. See if it's for you either way, I'm glad you're tuning into this episode. So my special guest for this week is Derek Polter. Derek is out of the Phoenix, Arizona area and Derek is just, what can I say, a stud, right? Derek in 2021 closed 575 units and what I love about part of the conversation with Derek is that we break down his realtor strategy and identifying, you know, the big question is, hey, who do you work with his realtor? Should I chase the ones he twosies or not? Well, Derek has the answer to that question and a whole lot more and Derek is a big believer in education and classes. As a matter of fact, it's one of the primary ways he's built such a strong brand for himself and has built such strong relationships and a flow of business from real estate agents. So he's already ranked in the top five loan officers in Arizona, top 1% nationwide and I am thrilled to be bringing you our special conversation today with Derek Polter. So without further ado, you know what's next. Let's get into this week's show. Derek, welcome to the show. Jeff, thanks for having me here. Thanks for being here, man. I know you're super busy and let's get right down to it. For the listeners, tell me just the background or how long you've been in the biz and kind of a look back to 2021, what was the units and volume? Got in the business at the right time of 2006 and got to ride that crazy wave of the implosion and been doing, didn't get out, stayed in the business, worked the way through it. And so now it's going on with 16 years and last year we did 575 units for 154 million. Wow, that's awesome, man. Congratulations. Thank you. Seriously, that's what they call a baller, you know? That would they call it? For sure, that's top, top 1% top 100, you know that. All right, so next when people hear that, they're naturally curious what your team structure looks like and like, where are you involved? Are you taking apps? Where do you interface with clients and just if you could walk us through that flow process? Yeah, what the team looks like. So I have Laways or Lone Offs resistance or Lone partners as you might call it. And I have four, what we would call front end. And those are guys that help take the apps, take the 1003 pool credit, you know, do all that. The pre-qualification portion, I participate in that as well. So I'd be your fifth guy if the team is very well trained. If there is a slam dunk scenario, they can take it, they can run with it. And if there's a problem or a question or whatnot, that of course it hits my desk for an escalation review. And then when files are in contract, that's where I also keep my finger on the pole. So those deals, I'm in the trenches involved with every one of those 575 deals at some scope. There's no way, in my opinion, that originally can originate that much business and do the 1003 to credit pool and all that. But the way that I keep my finger print on it and quality control is every Monday, I do a pipeline meeting and we talk about every loan and I go off. And my Mondays are pretty much dedicated to the outbound phone calls involved with buyers that have questions or issues or listing agents or buyers agents. And so my Mondays are dedicated to that pipeline management and quality control. Wow, that's a lot. And so your front end guys, those 4 people, I think you said it was, their license? Yeah, license in the front end. And so again, they can do everything from pool credit to talk rates and whatnot. And again, there's 4 and then plus me. So what we do is we go buy a schedule for inbound leads. The idea is you want to avoid leads going to voicemail, get to leads immediately and try not to allow it to pass more than an hour before we make contact. And so in order to keep that service level, we have to, you know, organize our shifts appropriately where if in the last hour I took two leads, I can't stay on deck and do a good job taking two more leads because I have to get those people documents reviewed and all that. So I might be on schedule for an hour, the next team member, so forth and so on. Okay. And you mentioned incoming leads. So what is your primary source of business? Real estate agents, I love real estate agents. They are the ripe tree to pick from. And there's a wide range of the realtor that you work with. I love to work with. My ideal realtor is a big producing team that is understands the dynamic of a reciprocal relationship. You know, yes, we're a lender and yes, you know, we're a rate and get clients up to have a good rate, good fee, but they also appreciate that a mortgage pro is truly a pro and they're in that relationship with us because they trust us as a business partner and don't just commoditize us. You know, they expect us to be competitive, but they still appreciate it. Hey, you got to work with Derek. His team is great. They refers the right way versus, you know, call Derek and five other people and let's have those guys fight it out for your business. My second favorite realtor is somebody who is alone wolf, but is in the business full time. That might look like somebody who's in their first year getting started and is very hungry and we can teach them the way to do business the right way or it would be somebody who's been doing it forever, but they're happy doing, you know, two to four transactions a month and they really hold their hands with their clients, they're not the person who's doing real estate part time. Okay. So there's a couple of things I heard in there. First of all, your favorite being that the team and what I'm hearing overall is that what it sounds like is you recognize, I mean, look, whenever you bring up realtors with loan officers, there's a bunch of often baggage that comes with that, right? There's some beliefs, some preconceived notions, like, you know, realtors are blank, filling the blank and then you're going to hear a lot of stuff, right? But what I love about what I just heard from you is that you're like, hello, you can be selective. You can actually choose who you work with, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you seem pretty intentional about that. Well, yeah, so I'll give you this analogy. I believe that I say we were talking for, you know, I'm in the core as well and so I have a really interesting view on the mortgage, not just mortgage, but real estate industry. I've been in the industry for 16 years. I've been professionally coached for, I think, 12 of those 16 and of those 12 years I've been a coach now for last five or six. So I get to see the mortgage business at that 10,000 square foot view or 10,000 foot view from my business, from the different students I coach and the conferences I go to twice a year and what I've learned in terms of being selective is, you know, you should define your accounts. And so for me, an A account is, or a channel account would be any realtor that I can give me 12 or more deals a year, basically a deal a month. And I target those by agents that have 20 or more buy sides. I know I'm, there's no way I'm going to get 100% of the business. But if they do 20 or more buy sides, there's an opportunity that I can capture 12 or more. An account for me, which would be an A relationship, is four or more deals, which means I can do a deal a quarter with them. And I can tell you that in 2021, I had almost 30 accounts. So you know, that would be four or more transactions of which I believe eight of those were channel accounts. That's 12 or more. And what's really interesting though is I had over 170 closings that came from ones easy twosies. So yes, you can pick who you're, who you're going to do business with. But I think you also, if you're going to work with realtors, you also have to know that there's a lot of realtors out there that aren't going to do, you know, $50 million a year. And they don't want to, you know, they just want to do a deal or two and, and you do a good job taking care of them. So I like to spend a lot of my energy going after the potential for big accounts. But my business is also set up where I cast a wide net so I can capture a lot of those that are only going to do a few deals a year and might only be one or two. Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. First question then is, how do you manage those, those, those hundred and whatever other realtors who send you the onesy twosies, right? How do you stay top of mind, you know, the whole agents aren't loyal thing. That's the other thing. So how do you keep coming back to you? You know, let's, let's drill down on what you just said. I think it's such a limited belief that shoots a lot of loan officers in the floor that where they shoot themselves in the foot. It's funny that I could say this is my realtor and I have yet I have 170 plus of them. But then I get all bent out of shape if I found out that they have more than one lender. So the way that I look at it is, you know what, you could view it as there's only so much business or there's an abundance of business and what I realize is in order to hit my goals and live a good life and, you know, take care of my family. I don't, you know, you could do that with just a few loans. We like to do, you know, more than a few loans a month. But even with that number, if I want to do 50 loans a month, that's still such a small percentage of the overall available market share for me. And so I just need to do a good job, have people that know my name and, and get a percentage of their business. I don't own them. So a lot of things I try to teach loan officers when I'm talking to them is like, you're not married to them, forget you're married, go dating with them. Date the agents because then you got to put your best foot forward. You got to recognize that they're on a date with another lender the day after they met with you. And that's just going to make you be on your A game and you're going to have to follow up and keep that relationship, keep that spark going. So I don't expect an agent to be loyal if I, if they are loyal, that's great, that's just a cherry on top. I would love every agent I work with to be 100% loyal to me because it would just make my job a lot easier. But I just, I don't expect that to be the case. Going back to your original question of how do I manage all of this? I'll give you an analogy I like to use is let's forget that we're in the mortgage business and let's just say that we're in the fishing business, okay? So every day I go out on my boat. I'm going to sail the seas and I have to catch a lot of fish. So I'm armed with three tools. I have a harpoon gun. I have a nice fishing line, you know, the strength for the open seas and then I have a big net. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend my energy sailing the seas looking for a big fish. You know, I'm going to hunt whales and when I find a whale, I'm going to use that harpoon gun. There's a lot of time and energy and attention because I'm going to direct my boat there. I'm going to have to aim for it, shoot it, reel it in. Maybe I don't come across a whale but I come across a school of bigger fish, you know, tuna, whatnot. I'm going to bring out my line for that. That's still going to take more energy not as much as really in the whale. But as I'm navigating the seas looking for the big fish in the whales, I'm just carrying a net behind me. And what I want is to grow the biggest net that I can get. So all the little schools of fish get caught in there. And that's how I got 170 plus me. If you look at my 2021 and my 2020 business, it's, it's so close. I think I did 170 in 2020, the onesie 2Z agents and 172 or 171 onesie 2Z agents in 21. So that's my big net carrying behind me, which is done via email marketing. It's done by doing things such as this. It's done by social media, you know, building a brand and sailing my ship and, you know, a realtor here and there gets conics, they go, oh, call Derek for this or I know I heard about this guy. And so I get a lot of those guys, but my energy Monday through Friday is spent strategically focused on going after the bigger teams or the bigger agents that could give me, you know, four deals a year or 12 deals a year, again, my accounts or my channel accounts. So you're saying that by, you know, whale hunting, essentially, that the bigger fish are just going to come along, you know, the bigger than the less bigger, the smaller, right? Because you're using that net while you're whale hunting that they're just going to come along during the process and you'll scoop those up. Yeah. So, so that's an analogy, right? So let me give you an example. So if I'm going to go after lunches or dinners or the phone calls, the energy that was the analogy of, you know, shooting the harpoon and rolling it in, I'm going to spend that energy on the agents that I know are doing more business, that therefore I can capture more in. But what is the analogy of my fishing net? Well, that is, you know, making sure that every single week I'm sending out market-based emails, I'm targeting all the agents, I want to grow my net mailing list. So every month, if I'm doing 30 or 40 or 50 closings, there's going to be listing agents on the other side at the end of the month. Yeah, I'm going to have the people that say, please, I'm a subscriber, remove me. But, you know, hopefully I had three unsubscribes and six, you know, new names I read. It's the mailing list just continues to grow every month. And by me, consistently marketing, that doesn't take a lot of energy, right? That's, it takes a plan, it takes energy weekly and monthly to have a plan and to do that, building out of the net. But when I do the activities like the marketing or teaching a class or touching a pain point like low inventory and multiple offers, that's the analogy of the bigger net where the onesie twosies get caught in. I love that, love that. So as you had mentioned in that wonderful explanation, by the way, thank you for that. I think that makes a lot of sense to people listening and that hopefully also deals with the question or issue about, you know, do you go after the onesie two agents and it's perhaps less so do you go after them versus attract them? Yeah, well, and it kind of go back to the analogy I'm giving you is that, you know, somebody who's doing one or two deals this year could be your hundred deals five years from now. And I've had a couple of stories like that. So I am not a fan of subscribing to qualify them first and, you know, screen them out. And, you know, if I obviously I do know who the whales are and that's from spending my energy inviting them to a lunch or inviting them out to basketball game to, you know, to get to know them better. I'm going to spend my energy there. But if I had somebody that is brand new in the business and wants to meet and talk shop, I will absolutely meet with them and invest that time in them because I believe in that how to win friends and influence people model of help them get to where they want and you're going to have more people helping you get to where you want to go. But going back to your point is if I am spending the energy of, you know, building out a plan that attracts people or building out a plan that just kind of scoops open as I'm going to give you a great example. I'm teaching a class right now of how to do three deals a month in 60 days and that is a series. It's a bootcamp series where I market it out and I market it to, you know, any agent can join it. But I also strategically target new agents because I know they're going to want to figure out how to get to three deals a month. And, you know, maybe they want to attract it to it, but I'm sailing my boat and they got caught in my marketing, you know, I do my part of my sailing of my boat is to make sure I'm marketing every single week and what am I marketing and so it just so happens right now that I'm marketing this bootcamp and, you know, we'll have anywhere from 30 to 40 realtors at shop to that class and we teach them how to be better at their business. Yeah, that's a multi-part series. How many sessions in that? I do that for seven weeks. Seven weeks once a week for seven weeks. I do it every quarter. Oh, okay. Every quarter then you take a break and come back next quarter. Yeah, I'm looking at it on Facebook right here where you're promoting it. I just because I do a lot of classes just did one this morning. So, and it works. That's why you do it. I see somebody like you doing it. It's because it works. What makes me so many I see a couple questions about this. You're delivering it over Zoom, right? Um, did you used to do classes in person before? Yep. Yep. So, we had to move, you know, who moved our cheese? We had to shift with the... What's the plan for the like you're going to go back to in person or hybrid or what do you think? Probably hybrid. I've actually been surprised at how well a ton of the Zoom has been. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's comfortable. People want both. Nothing replaces the human face to face it. But obviously the part of the outcome from the classes is you're going to get in person conversations. And I already have that. So, I think I've done three of these classes now and I've already had two really good meetings come from it. Wow. Okay. So, let me just couple of other things here. So, you're promoting this on social. You have a database of real estate agents. Obviously, you're emailing them, capturing the reservations on Eventbrite. And is it you teaching the entire series? Mm-hmm. And I have a marketing assistant. And so, her name is Anna. She's great. She calls herself the camp counselor since we're going with the bootcamp. And so, she sits on there and engages and interacts or brings things up or sometimes I ask her a question or two just so I'm not talking at a camera for an hour. Right. And because she's been running marketing with me, her and I've worked together for 10 years. So, she... We have a great relationship. And this particular class is not CE? No, but I do own a CE school and I do teach CE classes too. Own a CE school. Well, that helps. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that in the beginning of my career when I was begging realtors to take a coffee or lunch with me. You know, you'd get a good meeting and I felt gosh, when I could sit down with somebody, I can connect pretty well and you know, you don't win them all, but you have a pretty good success rate once we sit down. And I said, but gosh, just getting them to sit down is so hard. You know, you get hung up on, you get canceled on, and so I thought, gosh, how could I get in front of more people? I said, hey, they need CE. So, and... Man, to open a CE school, is that difficult? Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot of checkboxes and going through a new, I mean, to get it where I think it's viable took a lot of time. I mean, I had to not only do you have to do your L.O. license renewal stuff, but I remember a period there where I was working my 10-hour days in the office and then afterwards sitting in a CE class for three hours at night and I did that for months. You know, I'm just, you know, all, you know, breaks in between, but because you have to get all the, you have to have enough fair housing, credits, ability to teach fair housing and, you know, so forth and so on. So, you'd have to target the CE classes that you had to take in order to be qualified to be the teacher. And then on top of that, you have to have enough credit hours in that particular subject, but then you have to go do all the instructor courses for the state and then you have to submit your license or submit your application and you're new it. So, it's a lot, but, you know, going back to the net, it's great when the association says, hey, can you come on and teach and there's, you know, 150 realtor sitting in a room that I even have to set up, you know, so things like that pay for itself. And then also, as you know, you can just get a class approved by CE in your local state. That's another approach. It's funny. Of all the classes I've ever taught, I don't think, and we're talking back since 2003. I don't think I've ever taught a CE class, right? Is that right? Yeah. And I know a lot of lenders ask me because I provide classes for lenders and they're like, hey, are your classes CE approved? I'm like, no, they're not, and they don't need to be, by the way, if you want to succeed with classes. Yeah, I would tell you, I teach far more non CE classes than CE because CE is very rigid, right? A lot of times you had to do three hours, you know, minimum to make them worthwhile. And you can't sell, you know, you have to be very non bias. So, yeah. So, you know, and then on top of that, the busier that you get, the more that you might have somebody just waiting for you to trip up, I've literally had competitors in the class just waiting, you know, so CE is good, but really what it is is that branding thing. And then like you said earlier, it's the attraction piece. If you do a good job, you know, you're craft, and 50 people in a room, you know, there might be three people afterwards that call you and say, hey, I really want to get to know you more and do business with you. But you do just a regular class like what you're talking about, it's great because you can sell and you can add on. And you can pitch. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Thanks. All right. So let's talk a little bit. Let's talk about in terms of, so that's how you get in front of these agents that scale and manage them. You've got these. You're branding and you've got these top of funnel activities. Classes is one of them. And of course, I've already picked up on that you're building your agent database. Very smart. Marketing to them. Tell me about social, like I see you've got some videos here about market updates, and I'm just on Facebook. But where do you have a main primary social platform you hang out on? Yeah. So we have a business Facebook page. So the folder group is on Facebook as well as Instagram. And I think, you know, I definitely, the goal is to grow that and improve that. We made a rule a while back. We're not going to buy our following. So I think we have over 5,000 on Facebook. We have over 5,000 on Instagram. I haven't checked in a while, but I know it's it's north of those numbers. And, you know, pretty simple marketing plan, right? Post off then, do a video or two a week. Promote things that we're doing marketing wise on our social as well. Yep. And what's that? You win some reels. Yeah, you know, you always have to, they change up the rules and you got to go with it. So, rules is, I guess, the newer way to go. So we're just starting to do that. Yep. We're all figuring it out, man. Yeah. And they make it where you can't just master it. You got to consistently evolve. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. What are other primary sources of your business? We talked about real estate agents. What's next? You know, when you're fortunate enough that we've been busy. So as the business grows, a bigger business be gets more business, right? So you work with a couple hundred clients a year and then you get a database of thousands of past clients. So, database would probably be number two. I would say it's realtor number one, database is number two. And then I'd say business people is number three. I'd say advertising is number three and business people's number four. So if I had to say what are the four leading pillars of my business would be that order, realtors, database, marketing, and business people. All right. We'll get to ads in a second. But regarding the database, curious if you're using, like what do you must have tools are using homebot or anything or using homebots? A great tool. Definitely think you should have homebots. It's basically the interactive Zillow on steroids. If you do use homebot, my question would be what is your management campaign for that? You know, how do you make sure that all the CMAs that were requested were filled? Do you follow up with your agents to make sure that got done? So, you know, we do sweeps on homebot every month to make sure that the triggers it gave us was fulfilled by the team or by the partners we referred it out to. Do you have you done the partnership with realtors on homebot where they upload their database? Yep. Have you run into any headwinds on getting agents to actually follow through and do that? Well, that's where we get the CMA requests. You know, what we did is add a sweep on there of, hey, you know, we had X amount of CMAs. What's the status on that? And so it forces, you know, makes us go back to them and forces them to follow through. We could clarify the CMA thing. So, let's just pretend that, you know, you and I are working together on it and I get a ping for CMA and it happens to be on a client that you and I are connected on. We're going to ping that over to you. Hey Jeff, Derek wants a CMA and you follow up and then we're going to circle back around. Hey Jeff, how did that CMA go? Did, you know, Derek have any questions or anything we can do to help? Versus just pointing it off and then, you know, Jeff never falls through and I'm paying for this service. That's just, you know, this client, this client did a call to action and nothing happened with it. Inspect what you expect. There you go. Yep. So yeah, homebots great. And then, you know, several things I learned from the core, which is, you know, doing anniversary reviews, doing letters of the week, having a top client, top client list, doing events. We do a Santa event in December. We do a Thanksgiving pie giveaway in November. We do some type of other event like Easter, hide the Easter eggs, invite the clients, kids out there to find the eggs, take photos with Easter Bunny, run out of movie theater. All just different reasons to say thank you and stay connected with our past clients. Other tools you can't live without as a mortgage professional? You know, what I will say is I'm surprised at how many people that do very, very well that they keep it very simple. I've seen a lot of people over complicate their ability to be successful because they have to have a CRM that's 87 steps to master. And some of the most successful people that I follow were using Google Sheets using Excel. And what I found is it's called work for a reason. There's no substitution for it. There's no, if it's new, it ain't true and if it's true, it ain't new. So, you know, I got to use my LOS, we're using Compass, but believe it or not, I've run a pretty good business off of just Google Sheets and printed lists that I get put on my desk of call these people today. Really? Wow. That's cool. Yeah, that's true. I've seen that as well. And I guess it comes down to, you know, operational efficiency. If a tool or a platform, if you're going to use it, right, as provide certain levels of efficiency or scale, whatever, then that might make sense. And it's not everything is right for everybody. Yeah, in fairness, to give you, I mean, I definitely am a big fan of MMG Weekly or MBS Highway. Like, you got to know it's gone on in the market and get those alerts. That's been huge. I definitely have to have some type of video mailing. So, we do MailChimp and bomb bomb. And we use them for different reasons. Obviously, bomb bombs to send videos, MailChimp to send mass marketing. Social media tools are very touched on. That's good. Yeah. I wanted to, before I get into advertising, asking this other question, because you mentioned earlier, something about helping, you know, like any professional, you help people solve problems, right? And you alluded to helping them solve, if I'm correct, the low inventory problem. But I was curious as well. Like, how are you addressing that? How are you helping if at all agents with that? Are you leveraging creative financing? Or like, yeah, for sure. So, I work for Cross Country Mortgage. Ron, who's a CEO, is an amazing bright-minded duck. He asked me, how would you solve that? And I kind of did a wish list program. And he literally created the program for us, a bridge that we have 100% in-house. So, that bridge loan allows us to make non-contingent pre-approvals and advance the equity out of their vacating residents. So, that's a great tool for this market. So, that's one thing that we're doing. And then the other thing is teaching agents just little things. Like, again, being in the court gives me that bird's eye view, talking to one of my friends in North Carolina, who's a $120 million producers, a real turn. I'm like, what are you doing to be successful? You're still putting up 100 million. And he gave you just a short story. He said, well, Derek, we used to do inspection deposits. We don't have that in Arizona, so I don't know exactly what they call North Carolina. But the idea is, when we boot the sellers out of their house for a day to inspect their house, we would pay them 500 or a thousand bucks, just non-refundable to kick them out of the house and walk around the house and poke around. And he goes, now what I trained my buyers to do is they need people in to put up 5% of the purchase price and doing that. So, now people are spending 20 to 30 thousand dollars non-refundable to win these contracts. And he goes, and until my buyers even get into that point of mind that they're that serious, I tell them that their chances of winning are 50-50. And I spend more of my time with the buyers that are willing to take that big risk. And so I'm like, oh gosh, that's pretty crazy. I've never heard of that. And so then I bring that back to my market. And we don't have that, but I teach my referral partners, hey, this is what they're doing in a market. It's more competitive than us, which means it's only coming matter time before it comes here. So, you know, we're used to earn us money. Why don't you make a portion off or more and make a portion of the earnest money non-refundable? And you could even do it sooner. So I've won several or helps our buyers win several bidding wars by saying, don't just keep bidding because a smart listening agent's going to say that price isn't going to stick and we're just going to waste time chasing the birds and the bush instead of the one on the hand. And so instead, let's do 10,000 dollars of earnest money instead of 1%. And let's make $5,000 of that earnest money non-refundable by this day. If you really want to go step further, let's make that $5,000 be released to the to the seller within 72 hours of contract acceptance. And so now that seller actually has $5,000 more in their pocket, not three weeks from now or 45 days from now. They're 5 grand richer three days from now because they took your offer versus somebody else. So I mean, there's a lot of things like that that I have helped my sleeve because the I eat, sleep, and breathe the real estate. Love it. And that's certainly a way to weed out, you know, the separate the weed from the Jeff as they say. It's really going to be committed to playing ball in this tough market. Yeah. All right. So keep it on the clock. Let's not forget to go back to advertising. What are you doing for ads? So advertising, I think number one, what you got to do is the social stuff. You share your successes on social, be on social often. It's crazy to me that it's free. It's basically a free production studio that fits in our pocket and how many people don't use it. That's just blows my mind. So number one, be very active on social. Number two is I want to start the week and end the week with people thinking about me or, you know, top of mind. So I do email marketing that would include the standard stuff, which, you know, of course, there's the hot highlights breaking news stuff. But the standard stuff is I'm going to send out weekly rate breakdown. So this is this is the market rate on a 30, 15 year, et cetera. And then I'm going to do a highlight, which would be the product update or something like that. So twice a week, you're going to get something for me. We're going to teach you what's going on in the market. What's the trend of interest rates? And then I'm going to give you a program highlight or a market update or something like that. Lastly, we're really big on reviews. You know, we have over 600 Google reviews. We push that a lot. So I want to make sure that I organically pop up on SEO because we do a good job on our clients like us and they review us. Wow. Congrats. I'm pulling up your Google business profile right now, spending a lot of time helping with agents with that as well. 602 Google reviews. That's rocking. What is it? How have you been so successful in driving reviews there? Do you have a process? Well, do a good job and ask for it. So I have two Macy's credit cards because when they when they get me at the point of sale, they ask me for it and they got me twice because they convert it to American Express and said, we'll give you 10% off if you sign up for the new one. So a lot of times you do a good job and you ask and you get you'll get the business. And if you don't ask, you're not going to get it. That's brilliant. Do Macy's cards. Yeah. Love it. Love it. Okay. But I need to go back to the question. Do a good job and ask for it. It sounds very simple. But literally, do you ask, you know what I mean? Yeah. So the you know, they have to click a link, you know? Yeah. So up front, we really drive the fact that we're a referral based business and it's really important to, you know, all this spiel, you know, refer us. Don't give us a secret. But at the end, it is part of our process that when we fund, we congratulate them. We tell them that a service coming out and it would mean a lot if they surveyed us, it helps us a ton. And so that is a process triggered at the time of funding. And is your focus for the reviews? Is it Google versus other places? Yeah. So we have internally the auto software that comes out and does a, you know, send them a link that comes back for us internally. So we have, I mean, probably thousands of reviews on that. But I'm really driving the, hey, you're going to get that. And if you want to do both great, if you had to pick one, really help us if you did the Google review. And you mentioned something about like Google Business Profile Profile helps arguably with SIO and showing up in search. Have you found if anybody contacting you because of your Google Business Profile? Absolutely. Yeah. Google is definitely a good channel where we get business from. I'm hearing more and more of that. And as you may well know, Google's doing a lot of things to better serve the local business owner in a right way. So that's cool, man. Good for you. Yeah. I mean, like it's not surprising. I've interviewed quite a number of people that are part of the core. And one thing that's very clear about that is that you guys approach it like a business, right? And you take it very seriously and you've got systems and process. And like, if that's, first of all, if that's all you get from the core, that's well worth it. But I know there's so much more. But if anybody's listening, it's like, look, success leaves clues, right? And you've heard of Derek here. You've heard of many others. It's about system process, clarity of value, right? Communicating, being clear on who your targets are, being out there in front of people. I mean, dude, this is like textbook for how to build a successful business. Well, you know, early on, I just started to grind and make some money and figure out how to do the business. And I would learn from corporate America. The best way to hold yourself accountable is to have somebody else do it. So right out the gates, I maxed out a credit card, hired some coach out of Scottsdale. And he got my business off the ground. And after a couple years with him, I felt I needed more industry-specific coaching and training. And so I asked around the core of the radar. And so my thought is, I love the core. It's changed my life. I've been a part of it for a while. But any plan would work. If I'm trying to lose 10 pounds, I could commit myself to yoga or I could do, and P90X or whatever that's called, any product would work as long as I commit to it. And you hit the nail in the head. I think the biggest opportunity I would say to a loan officer or to a broker or a realtor is, yes, you're selling yourself and you're in the business of sales, but you're in business. So start running a business. And I see that we're spoiled often because the margins are so high that you can afford to be very sloppy and do two deals a month and still be okay. If you and I were running a subway franchise, you wouldn't get away with being sloppy. You know, everything is a process in the system because you're working off of nickels instead of thousands of dollars. And so if you really just approached your business, like a business, like you said, and it had systems and structure and a process for everything that you do, guess what? It stops becoming a rollercoaster and it becomes predictable and repeatable. Yes, and scalable. Love it. All right, man. This has been awesome. I really enjoyed it. For anybody who wants to connect with you, which is the best place, and we'll put links in the show notes, but where do you want to send them to? Go to my Instagram, go to the Polter Group, underscore real experts, follow us there. We got some good content that you can download right on our link tree, my contact information's there. And I'm always happy to help. So pay it forward. I've had great mentors in my life that have changed it. So if there's anyone that's listening that I can help, I'm happy to do so. Open line. Awesome. Grateful for the time. Grateful for the lessons, man. Appreciate it very, very much. And listeners, hey, if you like this episode, do you know what to do? Please leave us a review and we'll put links to his Instagram in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in. Derek, once again, thank you, my man. Jeff, thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for reaching out and for giving me your time tonight. Appreciate it. Take care. You bet. Everybody will see you on the next one. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Hey, thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And remember if you like this episode, please leave us a review that helps us reach more people and bring more good value and content to you, our listeners. And then, don't forget, if you are a loan officer who wants more agent referrals in less time, be sure to check out the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership at mortgagemarketing.pro and learn more about our turnkey system of agent classes that puts you front and center of your local real estate agents, attracting agents instead of chasing them and getting agent referrals like clockwork every single month, just like Kerry Cobb, who her first year in the business with closing over 75 loans, achieved 40% of those 75 loans exclusively from agent classes. And if you want to learn how she did it, now you can do it too. Once again, go to Mortgage Marketing.pro and I'll see you over there. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. Hey guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership before and I just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our Mortgage Marketing Pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. Done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you, everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attracting convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seats, partnering with affiliates, real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top LOs, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time, for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at MortgageMarketing.pro, see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call, we'll have a chat. We'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to MortgageMarketing.pro.