Become happier, more productive, and more efficient

Do you want to increase production, efficiency, and even happiness within your business? It’s important to build a team and mortgage process with purpose so that you aren’t grinding yourself into dust.

Whether you’re working longer hours, checking your email as soon as you get out of bed, skipping lunch, or taking time away from a family vacation to make some phone calls, overworking yourself is as American as apple pie. It doesn’t have to be like this! Rest is vital for production.

What loan officers should know about work-life balance

The evidence for working less is overwhelming: average production output per working hour decreases as hours rise. Production concerns are just the beginning of the business case for working fewer hours. Health, happiness, absenteeism, turnover and career longevity are also significantly affected.

The diminishing returns are so real, that research by Stanford University/IZA found that output drops sharply after 50 hours, and basically bottoms out after 55 hours. Someone working 70 hours produces little to nothing more than someone working 56 hours. That’s 15 extra hours of stress for almost no production!

Don’t believe us? Check out what one $60M producer has to say about the 12 hour days that had her on the cusp of crashing.

Putting research and data aside, if you could get the same (or better yet: more) amount of production in fewer hours, why wouldn’t you?

But… how?

Build a mortgage team with production efficiency in mind

There’s a cap to the number of loans that you can process by yourself before your pipeline runs dry again. Eventually, you realize that if you want to originate high loan volumes and reclaim your personal life, you need to have a team that can specialize in moving files forward while you focus on nurturing lead sources and bringing in new business.

Before thinking about hiring team members, it’s critical to have your workflow methodology defined. Who is responsible for what at what point in the mortgage process. Will you be taking the initial loan app? Or will a front-end coordinator? Who orders the appraisal? Who chases the conditions (not you!)?

These are questions that you need to answer in order to maximize each team member’s skills and define their roles.

Pro-tip from a high producing Floify customer: not all loan officers are skilled at networking and bringing in new business. These loan officers can be utilized in a salaried position as a skilled and licensed production partner.

Here’s a prime example of effective mortgage team building: A Floify customer that we spoke with last year detailed how he has maximized the efficiency of his team through mortgage workflow and task management. His team of 4 (including loan officer, 2 coordinators, and a processor) was able to close 425 units last year! To the tune of $91M in 2015 loan volume!

Mortgage process automation systems

Remember, you want to go home at the end of the day. It can be difficult to accomplish that goal without putting into place systems of automation to eliminate time-intensive activities that you shouldn’t be burning the midnight oil to finish. Staying in front of new leads, keeping borrowers and partners informed and updated, chasing borrowers for documents and conditions. There is a myriad of mines in this process that you can extract using effective mortgage process automation systems.

What are those big inefficiencies that are stopping you from bringing in new business? How do you eliminate some of the fires that always seem to start at the same point in the process?

Floify is one system that automates many of those back & forth tasks to make your entire team more efficient. Getting docs, conditions, disclosures, sending updates to everyone involved: all can be done in little time. The Floify Partner Portal can also give loan stakeholders (real estate agents et al) a way to get as many custom pre-approval letters as they need, without having to bother you during your time off.

Nowadays, there are some good front-end mortgage CRM systems that also help automate many of the repetitive marketing and “constant contact” that is needed for prospects, customers, and partners. We recently reviewed the top mortgage CRM systems in the industry.

Making sure you take time away will force you to plan and systematize your office in order to maximize the hours that you and your team are there. You don’t have to do this with software, but it does make it a whole lot easier.