Exclusive mortgage leads are your best bet to increase your business in the upcoming year. (Unnamed Copywriting)

Exclusive mortgage leads are your best bet to increase your business in the upcoming year.

Let’s face it. Sales lead generation is not as easy as it once was for mortgage professionals. The problem isn’t the same as it used to be, though. The mortgage market used to be flooded with brokers, bankers, and loan officers. It was almost guaranteed that every potential client that you talked to, even referrals, were going to be talking to another loan officer as well.

In order to find success in the boom market, lead generation had to be tailored to this kind of high level competition. In those times, it became a simple numbers game. A good loan officer would buy the largest batches he could of mortgage leads and refinance leads and blow through them as fast as possible. The idea was that the more people you talked to, the higher the likelihood that they would choose your prospective loan over some of the others that they were shopping.

This was a good approach, and it found a lot of people success. In a time where hundreds of thousands of homeowners had higher rates than what were available, there were hundreds of thousands of refinance leads available.

These borrowers are still here. As of Friday, mortgage rates for a thirty year fixed rate on the FHA program were down to 4.5%. This is the lowest they have ever been. Despite the foreclosure crisis and the lending crisis, there are still many homeowners looking to refinance.

The difference now, however, is that there are not nearly as many loan officers or mortgage bankers left to compete with. If you have made it through the down times, you know that it just isn’t the same as it once was. This is a good thing for you. It now becomes a situation where you can go into ever conversation with a new lead feeling confidant that the broker up the street isn’t calling them as well.

The problem is that, unlike before, most of these clients are going to be people that you can not help. Between the tightening of lending guidelines and the serious recession we are currently in, there just aren’t nearly as many qualified borrowers left. So what do you do?

There really is only one answer. In this type of mortgage economy, you are going to make your best money from an exclusive mortgage lead. These are borrowers that have already been screened, so you know that you can help them. More importantly, however, is the fact that they are not going to be talking to anyone but you. These are the leads that will cost you less work to convert, and will allow you to have a much higher average fee as well.