Surviving the “Big Shift”

– As the “big shift” in real estate lending continues with the purchase market taking center stage, new challenges arise for title companies and lenders to grow market share –

The “big shift” in real estate lending is on. As rising mortgage rates spur further declines in refinance transactions and historically low housing inventory limits existing-home sales, title companies and lenders face a challenging time to maintain and grow market share.

In this increasingly competitive environment, companies can leverage operational efficiency tools and market-specific intelligence to enhance customer service and increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, which can drive business that, in turn, helps protect margins.

One such tool is current, market-specific data that can be used to target new markets and cultivate high-volume loan officers. The DataTrace MarketView Market Share Report, fueled by the industry’s most complete property and homeownership dataset, provides nationwide data research and analysis to help customers gain actionable market intelligence for strategic marketing strategy and outreach.

Here are just a few of the ways it can strategically enhance sales and marketing efforts:

Identify and monitor key competitors, new entrants and potential disruptors.

Determining where your competition is conducting business and the volume of business they’re capturing provides insight that can inform your marketing strategies. With a MarketView Transactions Market Share Report, you can get sales and loan transaction data for up to 100 title companies and 100 lenders in any market. 

In addition to real-time data, trend data lets you see where competitors are gaining or losing market share, so you can determine how best to combat the competition in your existing markets or target expansion in underserved markets. The MarketView Trends Report provides the most recent 13 months of transaction history, detailing changes in each company’s market share by month and year-over-year.

 Research new markets for expansion and identify existing markets that require focused attention.

If your company is considering entering new geographic markets, an investment in a data-driven reconnaissance mission can yield valuable intelligence, helping to identify underserved and oversaturated markets. Likewise, consistent monitoring of your performance against your competitors in your existing markets can signal if there are specific markets that may require focused attention, whether it’s a need to address operational or staffing issues or increase marketing and promotional activities.

Our Transactions Market Share Report provides intelligence on all sales and loan transactions in a given market, while the Sales Market Share Report provides activity by sales dollar amount, and the Loans Market Share Report provides statistics on all loans processed.

1. Measure individual and branch-level performance, both internally and against your competitors.

   Monitoring and measuring individual and branch-level performance is critically important for excelling in the “big shift.” Since operational or staffing inefficiencies can reduce margins, the sooner they are identified, the sooner they can be rectified. Giving your branch managers powerful, data-driven information will help them identify where adjustments are needed and provide quantitative intelligence to support their decision-making, all in an effort to save time and money.

2. Identify top loan officers for marketing and relationship-building efforts.

   Loan officers are an incredibly important source of business for any title company and tapping into reliable sources that identify top-producing loan officers is beneficial. The MarketView Loan Officer Share Report accesses up-to-date information from the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS) to showcase the top loan officers based on a customized query. For each loan officer, the report includes the name, NMLS ID, lender, broker, total number of loans, total dollar volume and the loan officer’s share of the market. It even allows you to link to the NMLS consumer website to find loan officer contact information.

3. Make your marketing and advertising dollars more effective.

   In this competitive environment, increasingly precise marketing efforts will provide a greater return on investment. Digital advertising lets you almost instantaneously measure effectiveness and response rates. And now, data-driven marketing allows you to develop highly targeted and prescriptive advertising strategies and, importantly, prioritize marketing dollars for efficient and effective spend. With data-driven market-level intelligence, you can more accurately design and execute digital advertising campaigns that target specific customer audiences in support of sales and revenue goals – and provide the rationale to back up your planning and course correct along the way.

With the “big shift” moving the mortgage market, providing your team with accurate, timely and actionable market-driven knowledge can only increase your ability to compete and win.

To find out how DataTrace can help your business, we invite you to schedule a meeting or visit www.datatracetitle.com/marketview.

Check out our Efficiency Through Automation Series:

1. Pivoting to Purchase, But Staying Focused on The Digital Future 
2. Surviving the “Big Shift”
3. Keeping Clients in A Purchase Market Demands Speed
4. Striking The Balance Between Human & Digital Labor (Part 1)
5. How Search Automation is Driving Scalability – Case Study (Part 2)