Agent Advantage

Background:
In the retail mortgage space, the relationship between Real Estate Agents and Loan Officers is the engine that drives the bulk of the business. Word of mouth is a powerful thing and trust is essential when it comes to making one of the biggest financial transactions of your life. The majority of loans that GR originates come from Agent referrals who bring us more Borrowers than all other intake channels combined.

As a result, Loan Officers spend a significant portion of their day in a reactive state, maintaining these essential relationships by responding to questions like “where’s the loan at?” and “is everything still on track to meet our estimated closing date?”

Guaranteed Rate had built individual apps to support both Agents and Loan Officers, but these two pillars of our loan manufacturing platform were completely siloed from one another and lacking any cross-system visibility or functionality, despite the importance of the Agent + LO relationship.

Objective:
My goal was to design a workflow that would string these disparate systems together and enable our LOs to easily invite their referral partners to use our Agent Advantage platform or connect with existing Agents who were already on it.

Loan Officers would then be able to link Agents to their Borrowers that had loans in progress with the aim of getting all key parties on the transaction connected, collaborating and synced up on important milestone updates and critical loan-related tasks.

This was done by providing Agents the ability to track the loan status of any borrower they referred, delivering much needed transparency into how their client’s loan journey was progressing or if there were encountering any impediments along the way.

There was also a huge opportunity to accelerate loan processing time by providing the functionality to upload crucial documents like the purchase contract, which nearly always originates from the Agent’s office, anyhow. Doing so would save time by cutting down on unnecessary work and reducing the need for consistent calls and emails checking in for status updates.

Process:
I paired closely with my lead product and engineering counterparts and to map out a set of features were within scope to deliver in just a handful of sprints. Once I had the feature list in hand I went to work on putting a flowchart together for both the LO and Agent experiences:

Once I got sign off from my team on the proposed flows I got banged out the new screens needed for each of the two apps while trying to utilize as much of the existing frameworks as possible.

In talking with various LOs during discovery, it became clear that many of their relationships with Agents began at events like open houses and mixers, and that we could skip many of these invite and onboarding steps by having them scan a simple QR code with their phone. I confirmed the feasibility of this feature with my engineering lead and after getting the green light, I built it into the “Add New Agent” drawer.

Results:
By bridging these systems, we were able to add significant value for two essential personas with minimal lift. Loan Officers reported getting fewer emails and calls from their referral partners asking for status updates and our Agents were able to check loan progress for their clients any time they needed without having to reach out and ask for it.

Additionally, analytics showed that Agents were using two key features quite often: actively uploading the purchase contracts themselves rather than having their Borrowers perform that work and sending reminders to their Borrowers to stay on top of them if they weren’t completing their assigned tasks.

This push to connect Super LO and Agent Advantage helped GR chip away at its prime KPI of reducing the amount of days from pre-approval to closing and helped ensure that our referring Agents were more likely to receive their commissions, and in a more timely fashion.