And while brokers are gearing up for the spring buying season, Casa cautions not to forget about the refinances likely to surge throughout the year.
“If I were personally giving advice to clients, I’d say to brokers, I would say, yes, focus on the home buying season,” Casa said. “But the single biggest opportunity is, there is going to be a knife fight for your past customer. If you’re not staying in touch with them, if you’re not clearly setting expectations on how you’re going to support them, when rates come down, they’re as good as gone. All these companies are going to pilfer those past customers.
“My advice to everybody would be to really focus on how they’re staying in touch with their past customers, not just through automation, but through sales activities, phone calls, and conversations. Be in a situation where they prioritize client retention, because that will grow their business much faster than just the new business they’re originating.”
What Casa is saying aligns with what other mortgage executives have said. Michael Brenning, chief operating officer at eLEND, told Mortgage Professional America in October that servicers were coming for these refinances.
“Retention units inside of these big servicing shops that bought MSRs out there have the tools now and the support from their corporate organizations to retain those portfolios at a nuclear level,” Brenning said. “They couldn’t do that in the past, even as recently as the COVID-fueled refi boom. Those servicers weren’t prepared, technologically and process-wise, to support that boom. So the open market and brokers got to recapture their own clients and deliver them back.
