Are You Worth More Than $11.35 An Hour?
When you are involved with as many loan originators as I am, you hear all kinds of stories and concepts about how to generate loan opportunities. I think over the last few years, so many people have focused on lead generation that they haven’t spent too much time looking at conversion rates and profitability. A big issue was the issue of paying for leads. So I asked a number of originators to share some insights as to how they track their investment in buying leads and what the total return on that investment was, and how profitable it may or may not have been. The answers were pretty interesting.
- The number one most interesting item was that mostof the originators don’t track their cost/hour investments in purchasing leads.
- As a total percentage of their marketing budget in time and money, they don’t draw a comparison between purchasing leads and other opportunity generating investments.
- Last but not least, they don’t work the math to show their effective income rate per hour of the work needed to generate each application that closes.
I believe that the mortgage business doesn’t do a very good job at working through the numbers. In one specific case, a loan originator with a significant investment in time, money, and effort; the math was very interesting to work through. It also opened the door to another whole area of discussion that we will follow-up in the future, what “power” do you give up when you are in pursuit of those leads?
After working through the math, this loan originator saw that the net income after expenses on all the other areas used to generate opportunities, her net hourly rate for just generating the lead that closes was almost four times the hourly rate that was found on the leads that were purchased. In fact, the net income per hour prospecting and working the purchased leads netted $11.35 per hour invested!
Now this is just one set of numbers, but I believe that they do share a story. The story is that the work needed to obtain the opportunity can vary widely across the board. The time it takes to work each lead and convert it into a transaction is something that becomes really important to measure.
As we all know, the math used to calculate how “well” someone is doing in our industry can vary widely. Units closed and dollar volumes can be just the tip of the real story if you don’t dig down to see the entire story. We all know people that have greatly inflated numbers or have huge teams of people funneling up that volume, or at what cost?
Purchasing leads isn’t a bad thing by itself. Large production teams are not a bad thing by itself. Marketing agreements, desk rentals, joint advertising, and other opportunity generating techniques are not bad things by themselves; it’s just vitally important that you know the true cost in time, effort, and assets and compare!
This loan originator discovered that making $11.35 an hour to work the leads to the point of a genuine loan opportunity wasn’t worth the effort. Others may feel differently, but you really need to drill down and know the math to be sure you are happy with the money you are netting for the work you are doing!
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