Mining for Relevant Mortgage Trigger Events

When I hear the phrase ‘mortgage trigger,’ a movie starts playing in my mind. Maybe yours, too!

A couple is sitting across the desk of your competitor. They are just finishing up a new mortgage application. They have forgotten the long hours you invested building rapport, cementing yourself as a trusted financial advisor, and successfully running the mortgage maze to achieve their goal. A hero you should be; this app should be yours! But … they are sitting across the desk of your competitor. What went wrong?

More often than not, you failed to immediately communicate upon their mortgage trigger event that indicates high motivation and potential (intent). Now, you say, ‘How do I know this?!’

It’s Complicated …

All kinds of things can produce mortgage intent signals, and they are happening all of the time. Even long after initial applications for credit. Discovering them can be a huge and complicated undertaking. One of the most visible … and potentially useable … is credit-pulls or “triggers”. Credit data suppliers have a vast amount of raw data that speaks to consumer credit behaviors and intents. It is ever-evolving as ‘mortgage files’ move through the financial system. As such, a good deal of this data can be stale. Your mortgage lead generation mandate is to sort out what’s hot, and what’s not. The credit data suppliers are in the business of selling data.

What Will Trigger Triggers?

Here’s a common scenario …

An Originator pulls credit to pre-qualify a prospect for a new home purchase. A credit trigger.

It’s determined that reducing consumer debt will improve credit scores. Once done, another report is pulled … and another trigger.

Now pre-qualified, the home search begins. It takes 4 months … which outdates the last report. It’s pulled again. Trigger three.

The loan closes. Internal QC pulls another report to prepare the loan for sell, or the purchasing investor does (or both). Trigger four; maybe five.

As you can see, not all of these Mortgage Triggers were relevant to your get-new-loans marketing efforts. Yet many lenders are paying for the irrelevant ones. They then sink more wasted costs into marketing messages that don’t target potentially productive intent.

A Surprising Fact …

According to a recent study … after 9 months of a trigger-event ... less than 6% result in a new mortgage trade line. What does this tell us? Many people are getting their credit pulled that are not ready, willing, or able to get a mortgage right then. Why? Some possible reasons:

• Already have a low interest rate.
• Find a home.
• Sell a home.
• Accumulate down payment.
• Complete tax filings.
• Improve credit scores.
• Job transitions.
• Consumer debt burdens.
• Stall because of sales-hype overload.

These issues and challenges often take considerable time to percolate and get resolved. This is time you can use to your strategic advantage if you are armed with relevant problem-solving information, and communicate it effectively.

We know that not all mortgage triggers are intent signals, and not all intent signals are mortgage triggers. Differentiating between the two can make the difference between a ragingly successful trigger-campaign, or painful losses of time and money.

You MUST filter out the noise!