A Playbook For How John Downs Generates New Realtor Referrals Every Week

John Downs is a successful 17-year veteran of the mortgage industry. He averages $100 million in loan value on 200 units a year in the Washington, D.C. market. He also runs a branch that collectively achieves about $200 million and 600 units annually. Most people not only would be satisfied with that, but also would be very set in their ways after nearly two decades in the business and would want to sit back and be comfortable. Not John. Despite his years of experience and his high level of success, John was still willing to adopt new best practices to continue to change to be even more successful.

Now he’s a member of the Mortgage Coach community, and after just 45 days, he already has created over 115 Total Cost Analysis (TCA) and he’s using a TCA with every client. He also uses them with Realtors and is having tremendous success.

What best practices did he use to get there? I’ve done my best to write up the takeaways from our recent interview, but I highly recommend you watch this video to get the most value from our 16-minute conversation.

John’s Getting More Realtor Referrals Than Ever John has a unique process for generating more Realtor referrals. One of the key things he does is sends the TCA to the Realtor before it goes to the client, to get agent buy-in from square one. The email is simple. It says, “hey, check it out. Let me know what you think.”

John gives the Total Cost Analysis to the Realtor first, before showing it to the client, to get their opinion on the choices he made to ensure the options are on the right track. “The agents are teeing up on that and liking it even more. So getting their involvement in the creation of the TCA or at least immediately after is one big strategy we’re using.”

Just a few days ago one of his agents replied to his Digital Mortgage Analysis email saying “John, I just wanted to say I’m super impressed by your materials. Incredible stuff here.” His agent was referring to the TCA.

The other critical thing he does is work a lot of open houses. “When we actually work the open house, we're there with an iPad and a TCA (Digital Market Presentation) built specifically for that house.”

Now a lot of agents reach out to John to see if he or someone on his team can make a Digital Market Presentation for open houses. If no one’s available, they say, “I can't be there this weekend, but how about I do one of those digital market presentations for you with a quick little video; we'll make it about 90 seconds, and you can keep your iPad right up there and say, ‘Well, hey. Just check this out.’ They can hit play, go see another customer that's walking around the house, and then come back and say, ‘Hey, what did you think? Did you have any questions?’

Those two things that we've been doing have been pretty awesome and meaningful to new Realtors.” This is a huge idea and I’ve heard from lots of Realtors who use the TCA on iPad’s to increases leads at Open Houses.

It also helps them compete on a level above other lenders. “When I look at all the emails I receive and see just how vanilla they are, a snip, your rate, your APR, your payment, not even an estimate or an Excel spreadsheet, or just a real confusing one, I think having the agent involvement is key for us. I would say 80% to 90% of the time the agent winds up seeing the analysis that we do.”

Mortgage Coach Allows John to Engage the Buyer More Often John suffers from ‘call reluctance’. But the TCA helps him overcome this discomfort, because he feels it provides a reason to call the customer without being annoying. “When we started using Mortgage Coach for the initial consultation, I said, ‘It's already there. Why can't we use that as the catalyst to reach out to people every two weeks and update everything?’ So we changed our script at the time of final pre-approval, so that they’re pre-approved.”

When I re-watched this interview to write this article, it struck me when I heard John talk about his call reluctance...here we have a top producer who’s been in this business for 17 years and yet he is still experiencing call reluctance as an issue. This is a big point because this is yet another reason to use the Total Cost Analysis (TCA) with every buyer, because it gives you confidence as well as a legitimate reason to call a buyer and have a simple, yet valuable conversation.

Here’s some scripting help: during the initial buyer consultation meeting, he says, “We're going to call you about every two weeks or so just to make sure your home search is going well, and to let you know what's going on with rates and terms. We're going to update this analysis for you. But I also want to find out if we should be tweaking it. Have you lowered your price point, increased your price point, changed the area where the property tax structure might be different? Just expect that phone call from us every couple weeks’.”

By setting that expectation, they’ve been getting great results. “It's been awesome, because they're expecting the phone call. It took that whole call reluctance problem I had and it lifted the whole thing. So I can call because I said I would. Then I give them a little market analysis, and we send the new presentation. And it enables my team to do the same as well.”

It’s also a great opportunity for John’s team to re-engage with the Realtor. “We haven't updated a lot of the videos with those updates, but now we're thinking maybe we will. This week, we're actually going to start sending it to the agent as well, just saying, ‘Hey, we just updated their search. We talked to them. They told me to push the price point a little. I just wanted you to know where they're coming from.’

And as customers and agents understand the value of the insight, they start reaching out to him with questions. “I had someone say, ‘Hey John, the tax analysis piece with all the talk of tax changes, can you shed some light on that?’ That was a concern for the borrowers, and next thing you know I'm talking to the agent. It provided the catalyst of further conversation while people were going through their binder, so I love it.”

John feels he owes his success to all the coaches and industry leaders he’s had the opportunity to learn from: people like Todd Bookspan, Josh Mettle and Lori Richardson, who are featured in Mortgage Coach’s video interviews and training sessions.

“There are many great people who have helped guide me to get to this point. I actually signed up for Mortgage Coach two or three years ago but couldn’t get it adopted. It was being around that crazy successful, awesome group that cranks out hundreds and thousands of loans and their buy-in to this system that made me say, ‘I'm going to do it. I'm going to try. All these gods are doing it, so why am I not doing it?" That's now why I've seen the light to how powerful this program can be.”

John also uses Mortgage Coach to conduct Annual Mortgage Reviews with clients and Realtors. That gives him two extra touches. Here’s how the conversation goes:

When he speaks with the buyer, he says, “would you mind if I reached out to your agent to see roughly what values are?”

The buyer says, “No problem.”

Then the agent reaches out to the homeowner and says, “Hey, I just talked to John. He's doing your annual mortgage review. I'm going to work up the value and give it to him. I'll follow up later.”

Then John does the mortgage review and says, “Hey, I talked to your agent. He gave me this value. Here's what it all looks like.” He emails the agent and says, "Hey, I just did the annual mortgage review.”

Then the agent calls the client and says, “I see that John just did your annual mortgage review. How is everything going?”

A Final Message from John about Competing in Today’s Fast-Paced World

“We're now in a world where availability and speed almost matters more than experience,” he says. “We’re in a world where instant information is expected. If they reach out to one person and they don't get it, they call another, they call another, they call another.”

“There are lots of speed tactics in Mortgage Coach that can make you way more efficient way faster, and provide so much more valuable information. I used to lose nine out of 10 of those random emails that said, ‘Give me quotes’. Now I whip that TCA around in probably five, six minutes, including a video. Then the agent replies back, ‘This is awesome.’ Then, two hours later, I'm taking a full application on a locked-in loan.”

“We’re fairly new with Mortgage Coach, but we drank a lot of the Kool-Aid and are pretty excited about what it's done for, not only me, but also my team and my other loan officers in the branch,” John says.

In has just been 45 days with Mortgage Coach and he’s already saving time from past customized spreadsheet presentation. “It’s been a ridiculous time savings,” he says, “Mortgage Coach is saving me about 15 minutes per quote, which has allowed me to scale tremendously.”

Going back into sent files used to be a hassle in the past, but not with the TCA. “Now I just go back into the saved Mortgage Coach file, see exactly what I gave them, tweak accordingly, and then send it to them right away.”

“But when I first did it I thought it was the hardest thing, like this is so foreign to me. When I came back from my coaching trip and I listened to you, I talked to you again, Dave, when I was signed up again, and you said, ‘Just do 10, your next 10. Just do 10.’ I swear, that is the magic number. Once you hit that, you're like, ‘This is so easy’.”

CLICK to watch my 16 minute interview with John Downs and I also recommend you watch our recent Tuesday interview that showcased the workflow of 5 top mortgage professionals, including John, and showing how they all create a Total Cost Analysis in 5 minutes. CLICK to watch the full interview with 5 top originators and below is John's workflow creating a Total Cost Analysis and his scripting for Digital Mortgage Analysis video.

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