With all the political talk of the Bush Doctrine or how many Bush Doctrines there are. I thought I would write out the Lenderama Doctrine. Don’t worry, I’ll be brief.
Move Forward
You’re not seeing a whole lot of coverage from us concerning the financial markets. If you’ve been around here for a while, you didn’t see a whole lot of coverage on the Lender Implosion. Lenderama contributors are free to write just about anything they want, but I picked these folks because of their focus on moving forward. Go get your doom and gloom news at CNN. When you’re ready to move forward, we’ll still be here.
Harness The Web
While most loan originators look to lead providers as their online presence, we’ve spent the last three and a half years showing you how to grow your own leads. The Internet abounds with opportunity, and every day it gets easier to compete with the online giants. We’ll continue to show you how.
Reconize
Spelling intended. Lenderama will never try to represent itself as the last word on opportunity in the mortgage industry. When we find great articles from other sources, we’ll be all to happy to let you know about it. Here’s two from this morning that reflect our doctrine to a T.
How Can a Loan Officer Make Quick Money Blogging? – Mark writes a great article on how to use blogging to connect with referral sources. Great Post.
Historic Events = Historic Opportunity – I don’t know if Steve is right or not, but his head is exactly in the right place. If you intend to continue to prosper as a loan originator, you need to look at every disasterous event that happens in our industry as an agent of change that must be leveraged as positively as possible.
So there you go. The Lenderama Doctrine. Go ahead and print it off. Then stick it in your wallet, or maybe even mail it to Charlie Gibson.
Thank you for stopping by my blog, Todd. I am looking forward to meeting up at REBlogworld this weekend.
Todd
I have been following Mark for some time, and he is a man with a true passion for the business. Thanks to his help and insight, i have achieved [depending on the day of course] #1 ranking on Google for my targeted search term. Whats more impressive, is that Mark didnt tell me that would be a result. He simply said that, ‘These are the things to do’ and I did them. It just shows that impurffect implementation is better than perfect contemplation.
Thanks for taking the lead Todd. I hope one day to cross paths.
Chris the implementer
Sky Realty in Austin begin allowing “Vendors” (mortgage co.s, title co’s and inspectors etc..) to blog on the company website. At first it seemed like a bad idea, because we are a smallish company and I felt that any business the Vendors got from these blogs would be routed to the agents that were doing the most business with them. But, you can’t distrust everyone can you…and it seems to be working…
Don – You’re right about the trust thing. If you give people a platform to prove their ability to communicate and be a professional, it makes doing business with them a little easier. Basically, “Stop telling me how good of a loan officer you are, just write 15 articles on my blog that shows my clients what level of service and expertise they can expect if they choose to use your services.”
Jim Cronin at http://www.RealEstateTomato.com is a big advocate of opening up a local real estate blog and allowing other other industry professionals the ability to participate. If buyers are in one place, you may as well give them all of the information they need – title, appraisal, mortgage, home inspection, etc….
The benefit to the real estate blog is obviously links and fresh content. The benefit to the potential clients is education and an introduction to some of the transaction partners they may be doing business with.
If you are an agent with a high ranking real estate blog, it doesn’t hurt to leverage that power by giving your referral partners an opportunity to earn the trust and acceptance of your viewers while they help you build your online presence. Why should the real estate agent bare all of the responsibility for online lead generation? Worse case scenario, you just delete any content that doesn’t measure up to your expectations.
This is the future [or am i behind and it is the NOW] of real estate partnering. The big disconnect in moving from ‘internet lead’ to the ‘transfer of trust’ is the fact that so many people still use a website like a brohure. people DON’T READ OR GET VALUABLE INFO from brochures. They go to where real people talk about real experiences [think : consumer reports or customer reviews.] When you are posting fresh unique content online where people can come to ‘get fed’ the transfer of trust takes place before you ever even talk with them.
Chris
I really like what you said about not focusing on the lending crisis and instead placing the emphasis on moving forward. I think having that attitude will help reduce the crisis itself. So many of these current economic problems are driven by fear, speculation, and panic. If there was more focus on moving forward and weathering the hard times rather than moping about the dire situation, a lot of people would be in a better place.
I just discovered your site. What a great wealth of information you’ve put together.
I’ll be back!
Lisa
those that focus on moving-on will always be the minority… they will also be the ones that benefit from the changes that they are willing to put in place to move everyone [including those sitting on the sidelines] into the ‘new marketplace’.