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For loan officers and mortgage brokers on the market for mortgage leads, the quality of the lead should be a top priority when determining which company to invest in.
For this reason, before you invest, be sure to do a little research. After reading about the lead company on their web site, be sure to call and speak with someone in customer service.
The best way to find out about the quality of the leads before you purchase them is to ask some specific questions.
Ask where they obtain their leads from.
The best answer you can get to this question is that they own and operate the web sites where customers visit and fill out the on line form.
If a lead company is obtaining their leads from a third party vendor and than reselling them to loan officers at a profit, than they are basically recycling leads. Better put, they are selling junk.
And you never know how many times that third party vendor sold those leads to other lead providers.
Another question to ask is about their delivery method.
The most efficient way to have leads delivered is by way of e-mail.
Especially if you are purchasing real time leads, the lead will literally end up in your mail box within seconds of the customer hitting the submit button on the on-line form.
To sum it all up, a good quality lead is one that is fresh, not dated, or recycled.
And remember, you work hard for your money, so make sure you are getting what you pay for.
You work hard for your money, so before you go investing in a mortgage lead company, be sure you take your time and do your research.
We have all heard about, or have experienced the pain first hand of being burned by a mortgage lead company. And although this may happen to loan officers more often than not, there are some good lead companies out there, where it is possible to get a good return on your investment.
It is only a matter of taking your time and doing your research.
It also has a lot to do with the type of lead you buy as well, so make sure you research exactly what it is that you are buying.
If a mortgage lead company is buying their leads in bulk from a third party company and selling them to loan officers at a profit, than that lead company is doing what is known as recycling leads. Or, to put it bluntly, they are selling junk.
And who knows how many times that third party company sold their leads to other mortgage lead companies.
If a lead company is obtaining their leads from sites they own and operate on their own, than chances are you will be receiving a good quality lead.
Especially if they sell their leads in real time, andor, exclusively.
The best way to find out about how a mortgage lead company obtains their leads is to call and speak with a live person in the customer service department.
Ask point blank, how they obtain their leads. If you dont like the answers you receive, than move onto the next company, there are enough of them. Its that simple.
Always remember, if you are not happy with customer service, than more than likely, you will not be happy with leads.
Have you heard about mortgage cycling? Maybe you’ve seen the ads for books on this “secret technique” for paying off your mortgage sooner. Is there some useful information in them? Yes, especially if you are not familiar with the basic premise that you can pay extra principle every year and you’ll pay off the loan sooner and save thousands on interest.
Mortgage cycling is dressed up as a “new” system, and of course there are many little tricks to doing this most effectively. There are more risky techniques too, like using short-term home-equity loans to pay down your primary mortgage now. This latter technique could cost you more in interest or even put you into financial trouble that leads towards foreclosure.
The safest way of “mortgage cycling” is to just put large lump sums of money towards your mortgage loan every few months to a year. Pay thousands of pounds extra per year, and you will pay off your loan many years sooner. No surprise there, right, but what if you don’t have the hundreds of pounds a month extra needed to do this?
Money For Mortgage Cycling
Don’t assume you can’t come up with SOME extra money, at least each year. Some will say they can’t, and yet still add hundreds of pounds per month to credit card payments from buying anything from expensive shoes to snowmobiles. There’s nothing wrong with buying these things, but the choice is yours if you want to pay down that mortgage instead.
You can also pay off large chunks of principle by using your annual tax refund, insurance settlements that are not otherwise allocated, and any cash gifts or prizes you may receive.
How much sooner you can pay off your mortgage depends on how much extra you pay and when. The sooner you pay extra money towards the principle, the better. Let’s demonstrate with a simple example, just making an extra payment each month.
Suppose you have a 160,000 30-year mortgage at a 7% annual interest rate. Regular monthly payments would be 1064.40. If you looked at your second payment you would see that it’s composed of 932.57 interest and 131.83 principle (the amount you actually pay down the loan). Just add 131.83 to your normal payment of 1064.40, and you have taken an entire month off the time it will take to pay off your mortgage.
If you did this each month, you would cut the time to pay off your loan in half. The principle part of the payment would be growing with each payment, so the extra payment would be a little more each month (around 137 by the end of the first year), but hopefully over the years your income will rise enough to afford that. Consider that if you pay normally, your last year of the mortgage you’ll pay 12,772.80 (1064.40 x 12 months). On the other hand, pay about an extra 1600 that first year, in the way shown above, and you’ll eliminate that entire last year – a savings of over 11,000!
Other ways to pay off extra principle need to be evaluated carefully. You could, for example, put a few thousand of your savings towards the loan now and save perhaps tens of thousands in interest over the years. However, will you then need to pay even higher credit card rates because you emptied your savings account and need some money? You could cash in stocks and apply the money to the loan, but will you be giving up a 9% return to pay down a 7% mortgage? You may also want to consider paying off any debts with higher interest rates before you apply extra money to your mortgage.
To keep it simple, set aside extra money every month and apply it to the loan. Then use any other money that may otherwise be squandered (like tax refunds). If you just do a few simple things to pay something extra on the loan each year, and you can forget about complicated mortgage cycling plans.
Around 3.85 million home owners believe that a non existent state benefit will enable them to keep up with mortgage repayments in the event of losing their income.
Almost one in ten home owners wrongly believe that the government will pay their mortgage if they are unable to do so for reasons such as redundancy or illness, according to new research.
However, the government will not help anyone with mortgage payments for the first nine months of unemployment and after that, unemployment assistance is only offered to a select group of people who have mortgages of less than 100,000.
A further seven per cent of those surveyed by Lincoln Financial Group were not sure whether government assistance is available, and were seemingly unaware that the last Conservative government scrapped state aid in 1995.
Ian Noble, head of strategic partnerships at Lincoln Financial Group, said that the figures were a warning that million of Britons are enjoying a false sense of financial security, believing that the government will provide financial assistance if and when required.
“That is not the case unfortunately. The government is not going to pay for your mortgage if you lose your job, and assuming that it will place people in real danger is a large risk as it suggests they have no other mortgage protection plan in place,” said Mr. Noble.
Indicative of this perhaps is the news that mortgage repossessions are still continuing to rise dramatically, with repossession orders in England and Wales in the first three months of 2006 witnessing a 57 per cent rise.
Adfero Ltd