Every year commercial mortgage loan demand plunges by 75% in April. Our office phones stop ringing, and the place feels like a morgue. This happens every year, without fail.
There are some important lessons to be learned from this, even if you are not in the commercial mortgage business:
- Arrange for a line of credit in advance. It is absolutely true that banks only want to lend you money when you don't need it. If you actually need the money, the banks will sense your fear, and they won't lend it to you. The smart businessman therefore applies for a loan when he doesn't need the money. For example, commercial mortgage brokers usually make a lot of money between September 15th and November 15th. It's our busy season, just like Christmas is the busy season for retailers. One day in mid-October, when our business checking account was bulging with money, I asked our corporate officers to sit down with our banker and explain that April and early May are typically very slow periods. We successfully negotiated a line of credit, which is renewed every year. Because we did NOT need the money at the time of the application, and because we applied for this loan far in advance of our need, the banker was impressed with our planning and anxious to loan us dough. So lesson one is: Apply for your business loan when your accounts are flush with cash and far in advance of your needs. Never let your banker smell fear.
- Those of you who have visited C-Loans.com have no doubt played around with the blue buttons on our home page. You probably downloaded our free commercial loan placement kit or one of our other free gifts. In order to get these freebies, you filled out a little lead form, where we captured your contact information. We then solicted you to allow us to make you a loan, or if the deal was not a fit for us, we at least added you to our newsletter list. The web page that described the irresistible freebie is called a landing page. Please take a moment and look at this landing page. You will notice that it contains both the irresistible offer and the lead capture form. Lesson two: Your own website must also contain landing pages so that you can capture new leads and new contacts every day. We use the software of a wonderful company named Hubspot.com to create these landing pages and to serve up the freebies.
- Once you have captured hundreds and hundreds of contacts, you are ready for April. There are a number of ways to generate commercial mortgage leads - Google ads, website ads, the Yellow Pages, magazine ads, TV advertising (poor idea), direct mail, newspaper ads, etc. The best way by far, in my opinion, is list advertising. I've enjoyed some success in business, and the single biggest reason is because once I meet someone, I always add him to my newsletter lists. I do NOT advertise to strangers, but once I have met someone in the legitimate course of business, I stay in touch with them for decades. Okay, April is coming. What do you do? The HUGE advantage of list advertising is that you can increase the frequency of your newsletters during slow periods. For example, I normally advertise to my mortgage broker buddies every three weeks. During slow periods, like April, I increase that frequency to once every ten days. If I am really-really dying in the desert, I can even increase the frequency to once a week. When you list advertise, you have that kind of control.
Don't you wish that you made three times more money as a commercial mortgage broker? When I go to trade shows, mortgage brokers often walk up to me, pump my my hand, and thank me for my wonderful nine-hour training course, How To Broker Commercial Loans. But my best work is my new Practice Course, a course that is designed to take a struggling commercial mortgage broker and make him nicely profitable. It's not one, single awe-inspiring trick, but rather 63 smart business practice tips, each of which is designed to make the broker 3% to 5% more effective.
Been screwed out of an $18,000 commercial loan brokerage fee yet? Of course you have! It happens to all of us. Stop being a victim.
The moment you register on C-Loans.com, I'll send you a free $199 commercial mortgage underwriting manual.
If you run across the business card of a banker making commercial loans, I'll trade you a free directory of 2,000 commercial real estate lenders. We solicit these guys to refer their turndowns to C-Loans.com.
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