To keep up with today’s real estate market, agents are needing to be able to offer nearly instant service to clients during the house hunting process. As a mortgage broker in the industry, it’s important to keep up to the same standards to support clients and real estate partners as they work through the loan application.
Modern technology allows for many previously lengthy and tiresome aspects of the home loan (and home buying) process, to be completed quickly and painlessly! Today, we’re giving you a thorough guide of the 5 phone apps every tech-savvy mortgage broker should use.
How it works: Docusign is an application that allows users to virtually sign documents and submit them back to the requesting party. First, when setting up an account you chose a style for your signature as well as your initials. At that point, you either upload a document, or another party sends a document directly to you through the application. You can easily fill in any text fields needed by typing directly in the app, and then you can click to sign on the signature line with your chosen signature style.
Why you need it: Not only is this an efficient and secure way to share and sign documents, but it also makes it easy for your clients to keep an electronic version of their documents in their digital record. Instead of thumbing through a bulky paper version and getting hand cramps from signatures, your clients will be able to focus on the content of the agreement and easily save the digital version for viewing later.
How it works: When you have a contract signed and need to share that contract with other parties, the Scanner app is a great tool. All you do is place one page of the signed contract on a flat surface, open the Scanner App, and use it to take a photo of the contract page. The app will convert the picture into a PDF and from there you can share it directly with anyone who needs it through email. If you have a multi-page contract, you can just click the “+” sign after taking the first photo and repeat the process to add an additional page to the PDF before sending it out through email. Note: make sure you have good lighting when taking the photo to ensure a clear image.
Why you need it: This is another insanely useful phone application that can really make your life easier as you’re working with clients. In some cases, you won’t be lucky enough to have a document sent directly through Docusign, and you’ll need to scan a physically signed contract to share it with all necessary parties. This is where the Scanner App becomes a much easier alternative at out-of-office meetings…
How it works: This app functions exactly how you might expect a mortgage calculator application to work. It allows you to enter data like down payment, interest rate, loan term, and other necessary metrics to help your clients determine their monthly payment. It can also show an amortization schedule of the loan, and help compare how different loan terms will affect the monthly payment and overall cost of the home.
Why you need it: This is a great tool to use to help your clients visualize how each factor will affect their monthly payment and overall cost of their home. You can walk through each factor with them and watch the metrics change. Of course, you have more sophisticated tools to determine their actual terms and monthly payment, but this is a great estimator when you do not have a client who is ready to commit to getting a pre-approval.
How it works: The Nextdoor app is a social network to help crowdsource hyper-local news and information, as well as foster a community. Think of it as a virtual bulletin board for your neighborhood, where users can have conversations about local events as well as develop ideas to fix local issues.
Why you need it: As a mortgage broker, not only are you responsible for helping clients secure a financing, but you can also be an advocate for the local community. Clients will expect you to have a finger on the pulse of the local neighborhood. You don’t have to be quite as involved as real estate agents, but as a local industry professional, it’s still important to be able to tell clients about the place where they will soon be calling home.
How it works: Hootsuite is a website that allows you to schedule social media posts to go out to certain platforms at specific times. It can help you organize your content for each platform and plan a content strategy in advance. It also allows you to save time by scheduling posts instead of having to sign in each day at an optimized time to send out content.
Why you need it: As a mortgage broker, it is important to build your local brand for new clients to easily discover you. One way to do this is to create social media pages and contribute your ideas and knowledge to the world. Not only is social media a great place to display your expertise, but it is also an excellent way to stay in touch with clients without constantly sending them emails. With social media, you’ll be able to keep tabs on your past clients and know when they (or one of their friends) may be in the market for a mortgage.
If all of these apps are on your phone already, you can consider yourself a tech-savvy mortgage broker! Do you know of other apps that brokers should use? Tell us what they are in the comments!
