With demand outstripping supply across the nation and homes often attracting multiple bids, it should come as no surprise that CoreLogic has reported that home prices were up in April 13% year over year. In FinLocker’s hometown of St Louis, real estate agents report that 90% of their listings are attracting multiple offers.
With such a booming real estate market, you wouldn’t know many first-time homebuyers continue to face multiple hurdles to qualify for a mortgage loan before they can even enter the market to achieve their dream of homeownership.
June is National Homeownership Month. I want to challenge everyone reading this to help your prospective homebuyers overcome the common hurdles to homeownership: saving for a down payment, improving their credit score, and reducing their debt-to-income ratio.
Here are a few ways to get started:
- Create an email campaign that provides prospective homebuyers with tips to overcome the main challenges.
- Post one new article to educate your prospective homebuyers to your consumer social media channels each day. You could also attract new leads this way. You are welcome to share the blogs in the FinLocker Learning Center.
- Demonstrate your knowledge as a financial advisor by publishing blogs that you write to your website. Use those links in your social media and email campaigns. Capture the additional visitors to your website by concluding each blog with a sentence that you offer a non-obligation pre-qualification to help first-time homebuyers know where they stand for mortgage eligibility.
- Host a first-time homebuyer webinar or workshop. Start your presentation with a few slides that highlight the main steps of the mortgage process, then open the remainder of the session up to questions. Partner with one of your real estate agents to speak about home buying. This strategy will also help double the marketing efforts of your webinar.
- Following pre-qualification, give each of your prospects who are not ready to proceed with a mortgage application a FinLocker white-labeled with your brand. The app will analyze their enrolled financial data and create a customized path to help them overcome their barriers with intuitive tools and educational resources. Your first-time homebuyers will stay connected to you and can start their mortgage application by sharing their financial data and documents directly from the app.
Let’s aim to improve access to credit and reduce discrimination for each person buying a home or refinancing. Homeownership is the leading way Americans build personal and generational wealth. As the stewards of the American Dream, we need to do everything within our power to help more Americans achieve that dream.
