Process Management in Mortgage

The technological landscape for mortgage lenders and brokers has changed drastically in the past several years. We live in an evolving landscape of new tools and widgets to help us with everything from taking borrower applications, collecting documents, communicating with third party vendors. It’s difficult to keep up.

One of the biggest challenges we see with our clients today is the ability to manage all of the different moving pieces from lead to closing and beyond. Not only are there many different applications/programs that go into the overall strategy, there are humans at every step of the process causing delays… and delays cost us both time and money.

Everyone in mortgage wants to close loans faster, so they can do more work and push more deals through the pipeline with less resources and costs. Sounds easier said than done.

There are two big problems we’ve seen time and time again across hundreds of companies before they implement any sort of solution.

The first problem we will discuss in detail which is what we call Frankenstein. This has become almost a syndrome of individual point systems cobbled together to give the illusion of -- one. Again, we'll spend a lot of time on Frankenstein here, and in other future publications.

The second and probably biggest problem; they don’t have an organized manner or process for managing people in a systematic way. In it's simplest form, those in mortgage are reactive, putting out fires as they arise.

As you'll start to see more and more in our messaging, we're all about doing the opposite of both of the aforementioned problems. Let's anti-Frankenstein our tech stack. Let's become proactive and extinguish fires before they become too hot.

From a Mortgage Production Line standpoint, it’s of increasing importance that you manage your Mortgage CRM, your Mortgage POS, your Mortgage LOS, your Document and Communication systems with one centralized strategy and the key to implementing this with the most success is to have one, singular, centralized process management strategy.

You know the old adage that time is money…. Which the inverse could also be true… delays cost money. The more time a loan takes through the process the more time your employees spend on each individual piece, and the more your costs go up.

Ever had it take more than a day to order a payoff statement? Tax transcripts? Borrower stipulation requests? Etc?

Ever had an employee miss an email or wanted to pull your hair out wondering if your team is up to date on the different loans?

Having a centralized mortgage Project Management system is the key to help branch managers ease frustrations throughout the loan process so that they can finally go home at a normal time every day knowing that their (and their teams) tasks are done for the day.

Without further adieu, here are

4 ways implementing a Project Management system into your process will make you more money.

1. Reduced closing times

As we previously stated, the amount of time it takes for a loan to go all the way through your pipeline is going to directly determine how many loans you are able to close on a given month. A processor or backend team can only handle so many tasks in a given day and bottlenecks are the cause of an insane amount of lost time and money.

If you don’t have a centralized Project Management tool, it’s difficult to identify or predict where those bottlenecks are going to happen and step in or add additional resources to help.

For example, lets say your processor comes into work and just realized she has 7 loans that were approved with conditions today as well as 4 new loans recently submitted into processing. That is a ton of work which could take several days in addition to meetings, calls, closings, etc.

If you don’t have the ability to see that this is happening, and call in backup, you will see several delays in all 10 of those loans. You’re talking several days of delays because your team is still using outlook and email to accomplish tasks.

2. Improved Team Insights

In the example above, we mention that the processor is bogged down because she had a lot of activity all at one time in his/her pipeline. It would be expected in that scenario for that processor to ask for help and pull in backup themselves, however that’s not always the case.

As managers, it's our job to be our teams support systems and understand how to organize and execute with the resources that we have. If we don’t know where these bottlenecks are happening and are relying on our teams to tell us when they need help, we will still see significant delays.

With an organized strategy and task management system, we can finally see real time reporting into tasks due, overdue tasks, workload, and overall productivity for every member on our team.

Say goodbye to micromanaging and efficient communication.

3. Improved Internal Communication

Speaking of efficient communication - wouldn’t it be amazing to not have to breathe down every person's neck to understand what is happening with the conditions on every single loan? That’s not good for the managers health and well being or for the team members sanity.

If you don’t have streamlined project management, most of your time is wasted sitting in your email inbox (or slack or microsoft teams if you’re advanced) asking your team for status updates rather than leading your team and getting work done!

4. Improved External Communication

This isn't’ just our internal team either. There are real estate agents, borrower portals and borrowers, title companies, closing agents, etc… that also need to understand where we are in each step of the process.

An optimized project management tool can streamline your external communication in addition to internal communication.

If we could magically give you back all the time you and your team spend sending messages back and forth, back and forth, how much smoother would your entire system be?

Finally, if you’ve implemented the strategies we preach with Intelligent Loan Manufacturing and the Mortgage production line your project management or task management capabilities become the central nervous system for your mortgage branch. 

Our (Lodasoft’s) proprietary mortgage task management system is just that. We've built the same technology that the big guys have for a fraction of the cost. (quicken loans, loan depot, uwm) 

Finally, a way for your bankers, processors, and third party providers to have one centralized place for all of your communication and work management. Have you ever seen the screens the employees at McDonalds use to pump out the orders super fast? That’s what Lodasoft is for mortgage tasks.

If you want to take your branch to the next level by streamlining task management and communication, take Lodasoft for a spin by scheduling a quick DEMO of the tool.