Cogent Road Provides Tools Helping Build Referrals

The head of Cogent Road, San Diego is the latest mortgage industry insider to seize on the idea that for mortgage brokers to survive, they have to lose the transactional mentality.

"There are a growing number of originators looking to build referral networks, but they are all following the same strategy to do so," said William DiPaolo, chief executive. "They look to take that high performing real estate agent to lunch. They try to convince the agent that they provide the best customer service," he continued.

The biggest flaw in this strategy: "Everybody is doing it and so they can't really differentiate themselves. They soon become frustrated when the time, effort and energy they expend trying to gain the trust of the real estate agent is not returned to them in the form of referral business," Mr. DiPaolo said.

Cogent Road looks to support its mortgage lender clients with a different approach to building a referral network. Its Funding Suite® mortgage credit platform performs "credit proofreading" so the mortgage professional can legitimately improve credit scores by detecting and resolving credit data and credit usage errors.

The company's applications can be packaged up and presented as part of its Referral Tool Kit, a series of four educational presentations which they can show to real estate agents. "So the natural course is for that real estate agent to say 'in order for me to best serve my customer, I need to refer you to this particular mortgage professional because they can put you in the best possible loan,'" Mr. DiPaolo said.

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