Successful Mortgage brokers and Loan officers use one thing very well: Productivity Tools. That’s right, as a Mortgage Broker, you simply can’t afford to waste your valuable time and have unproductive days. The continued and future success of your business depends on your ability to work smarter and maximize your results in lesser time.
To help you succeed in getting things done, I am sharing with you a wonderful list of must-have productivity tools for Mortgage Brokers that you can start using right now to be more efficient and become a time management rock star. Feel free to skim through this list and pick the ones that suit you best. I won’t be offended.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding automation software designed to help you request, collect, approve and share your clients’ documents in a professional way. Used by hundreds of Modern Mortgage Brokers and Loan Officers from all over the world as part of their Loan origination process, Clust takes the pain out of document collection with a secure and easy-to-use interface and great features.
You don’t even need a website to use the app and the responsive Client portal makes it super easy for your clients to send you the right documents at the right time from their smartphones. (Hey Millenials are changing the game right?)
Its features include: Errorproof Checklists, Discussions, Due date, Automatic reminders, Integrated Forms, request templates, GDPR. My favorite is the automated reminders, allowing you to make sure you get your borrowers files right on time!
DocParser is a wonderful app helping everyone to extract data from any PDF whether you need to automate the data extraction from Invoices, Contracts, Quotes, Bank statements and more. All you need to do is to is to create a Parser which is the template of documents you’ll need to extract data from, then create parsing rules (eg. ‘I want to extract all dates’) and Boom you’re done.
DocParser is free to start, then you’ll pay $19/month for 100 documents, with the cost increasing as you process more documents.
Cam Scanner serves as a portable yet powerful scanner for your smartphone or tablet. Access, edit, share and sync all your scans from your preferred mobile devices in seconds. The coolest thing about CamScanner is that it’s 100% free for your clients.
HootSuite is extremely useful when managing several social media accounts at once. You can schedule, pilot and automate your posts across all your preferred social networks from a single place and also add team members to help you engage with your audience. My preferred feature is the performance measurement! Definitely essential to improve your Social media Marketing Strategy.
Fiverr is one of the best tools for outsourcing any time-consuming tasks. You need someone to create your social media visuals, to make an explainer video, to fix your WordPress website? Head off to Fiverr, millions of freelancers can help you with your small business needs.
Join.me is an absolute must-have productivity tool for Mortgage Brokers needing to make their meetings more productive. It’s very fast to set up a meeting no matter where your participants are and to share with them a link to give them access to the virtual meeting room.
Noisli has become increasingly popular for busy professionals and I am sure you’ll love it as a Mortgage Broker. Noisli is an ambient noise generator which keeps your mind from wandering and helps you stay focused. I love it because it’s extremely simple to use, you basically need to pick your listening experience, and that’s it.
Toggl is a brilliant web-app which is widely used by startup founders and freelancers. It leverages the Pomodoro technique to help you get things done, on time and without hampering yourself in the long run. I love their additional features such as projects which you could use to track the time you spend doing a specific task as part of the mortgage process for example.
Calendly automatically takes care of your appointments, meetings, demos and interviews scheduling so you don’t have to. And to help stay on top of your calendar, it also integrates with Outlook and Google Calendar.
Taskade is an effortless, beautiful Chrome extension for Mortgage brokers needing to write down a number of things throughout the day. Taskade allows you to capture your thoughts, organize your day, make a to-do list and collaborate with your team or family from your browser.
Rather than writing about how to fill up a Loan application form, or spending hours educating clients about a specific topic You can use Loom to show your clients exactly how it works. With Loom you can decide whether you want can capture your screen only or also have yourself through the front camera on your laptop.
I am sure you’ve already created your Facebook Business page. If so, then you must know how tempting and distracting the Facebook newsfeed can be when you want to write new posts, answer fans questions or find new content to share from your page.
With Facebook Timeline Eradicator, that’s an old story: no more distraction, you can finally focus on what counts and get your time back.
This simple Chrome extension removes pretty much anything from your Feed and filters out what’s important based on your settings.
PayPal has developed a wide range of features allowing Mortgage Brokers to accept payments securely from anyone in a few minutes.
You can send invoices via email to get paid by your clients even if they don’t have a PayPal account or install PayPal Checkout on your website to process payments directly from your website.
Rescue Time does the same as Toggl but with much more features. You can install it on your computer and track how you spend your time online.
It’s amazing! Not only does it tell you where you spend the most time (eg. Facebook) but it also lets you know which hours of your day were the less productive.
No one has time to print out documents, sign them and email them back. HelloSign makes this process easy and secure.
You can send out agreements and contracts to be signed by your clients, no matter they are and add comments on the side of each document in order to collaborate with your clients from a single place.
When you’re not a creative guru, it can be a pretty daunting process to put together great visuals for your social media accounts.
Trying to perfect Photoshop or Illustrator is a full-time job. Canva is here to save you! With free templates, you can put together in minutes the best visuals for your Facebook Business page or Instagram without a headache.
Unroll.me is a free service allowing you to unsubscribe en masse from newsletters or mailing lists with a single click. It works with almost any email client such as Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook or AOL.
Boomerang is the perfect productivity tool for busy Mortgage Brokers who want stay organized with their emails backlog.
Boomerang reminds you if an email has not been replied after a certain amount of time and you can send emails later so no one knows you’re working late hours.
Wunderlist is a wonderful and powerful app to manage your to-do and stay on top of your agenda.
You can gather in one place all your to-dos, set up reminders to make sure your tasks don’t fall through the cracks and even email a task to your Wunderlist to add it to a specific list.
SaneBox scans your past email activity and defines patterns: which emails are useful, which ones are not. Once that’s done, a folder is created for anything needing less attention from you.
When you have a minute or want to pretend you’re busy you can go through this folder and check what’s there.
I have spent years storing my passwords in an excel spreadsheet until I discovered LastPass. It provides a genius and more secure way to store, access and therefore retrieve all your passwords like a ninja.
Big plus: it works across all your devices so you don’t need to reset for the 5th time this password because you don’t have access to your favorite excel spreadsheet.
As a Mortgage Broker, PandaDoc will increase your sales productivity by reducing the time you spend today creating, content proposals, one-pagers, quotes, contracts, etc and send them through to the cloud to your clients.
You don’t need to be a web designer to build beautiful websites. With Unsplash, you can download for free, thousands of elegant pictures just about any topic and update your website or blog with more appealing pictures.
Skitch is an Evernote solution that allows you to share feedback with anyone with a screenshot and get your point with less back and forth. It’s a great way to mark up documents or pages and share them with your stakeholders from your iPhone.
GoAnimate is now called Vyond, but it’s just doesn’t change how amazing is this tool when it comes to DIY explainer videos. You can start from a variety of themes and characters to build a captivating story around your brand or educate your customers about mortgage loans.
No Business owner likes to chase slow-paying clients that’s why everyone loves InvoiceSherpa. You can plug it into your current accounting software and send them reminders so you can get paid faster. Another great feature is the client late fees!
It’s often harder for new users to grasp the full potential of Evernote. But let me tell you something: this app is wonderful. You can save notes (audio and text) and organize them into Notebooks. You can also organize photos, set reminders, upload attachments and even clip web articles to be read later. Evernote lets you organize your entire life! Who doesn’t need that?
IFTTT which means If This Then That, helps you create “recipes” to organize your work. For example, you could create an IFTTT recipe that automatically adds to a Google spreadsheet the list of users who like your tweets.
Franz is the desktop tool we’ve all dreamt about at some point. It connects all of your favorite messaging apps under one roof so you can keep up with your Skype, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp (and many more) conversations without going nuts.
Lob offers a set of APIs and hundreds of integrations to help you send out automatically physical mailings to your clients and stakeholders. It’s a powerful tool allowing you to print out and send out postcards, letters and even checks to anyone’s address with the best cost.
Mailerlite is an affordable alternative to MailChimp for email Newsletters. (It’s free for up to 1000 subscribers) And it’s quite easy to use, not mentioning that it’s a powerful tool that you could use every day for your Mortgage Business.
It allows you to set up A/B testing, to create beautiful emails in a few minutes and add Mortgage lead generation forms on your website.
I bet you’ve already heard about Slack. If you didn’t, I am glad I made you discovered this must-have. Slack allows Mortgage Brokers to get less busy. How? By bringing collaborative work to another level.
You can use Slack to communicate remotely with people or use their tons of integrations to get notified when something important happens with your leads or clients.
Mortgage Brokers spend hours in front of their computers. With Flux, you’ll be able to automatically adjust the color of your computer’s screen based on the time of the day. And trust me it makes a huge difference for your eyes. (#nomorebagsundertheeyes)
Wix is the Mortgage Broker perfect website builder! Almost like a Powerpoint presentation, you can drag and drop web elements to your Wix template and break the internet in a matter of seconds.
It’s super intuitive and offers tons of brilliant features such as Wix ADI which helps you create your website with Artificial Intelligence Technology.
Pipedrive is a visual CRM that allows you to create and organize boards in order to track your deals. It’s a very effective and intuitive CRM that you can use to onboard clients more easily and make sure you turn them into clients.
Take the most out of your commute with Audible. It allows you to download thousands of audiobooks that you can listen to while on the road.
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
–Dr. Seuss
Kin Calendar is supposed to be the new Sunrise Calendar. The app is not yet released but it really seems to be very promising. You can sign up right away to learn more when they invite you to join.
“The 10bii Financial Calculator is a versatile and powerful financial calculator which features more than 105 different functions.”
A must-have productivity tool for Mortgage Brokers and investors! You can use it to calculate your returns on mortgage notes or run amortization schedules and much more.
Customer relationship and word of mouth make a great business. With Felt app, you can send from your phone or Ipad, handwritten notes to your customers on any occasion and have them sent out by mail.
I love the gift feature allowing to attach to your card a small gift. Ideal when you run a contest or sweepstake!
Invoice.to is an invoice generator which helps you send you very easily, online invoices to your clients. You can also accept PayPal or Stripe payments. It’s in simple as that!
Running your own business can be overwhelming, especially when it comes to accounting. Wave is an affordable way to do your own accounting and stay on top of your money even if you don’t have yet an accountant.
You can use it to manage your personal and professional accounts more effectively. And did I mentioned that it’s free?
Recordit is a simple Chrome extension that you can use to record your screen and turn it into nice Gifs. If you’re targeting Millenials in your lending (and you should), it’s a great way to share screencasts with them or guide them through a process.
When I work is a team scheduling and shift planning app that looks great on your team members phone. Pretty useful to monitor your team members calendars from any device. You can add employees and plan their schedule per day, week or month to make sure your business runs smoothly.
For Mortgage Brokers tired of the iPhone email app and needing a more intelligent and advanced email solution, there is one called Spark.
It organizes your emails in categories like Gmail does on the web and you can not only search for emails but also for attachments which makes it easier for you to find that loan agreement sent last year to your client.
TapeACall does what it says. It allows you to record your calls, customers interviews, conference calls right from your iPhone. It’s free for a limited recording time, but you can always upgrade for $24.99/year and get unlimited recording.
If you’re familiar with Clust, you must know already how much we hate paper. We want every document collection process to be fully digital and our Small Businesses to spend less time collecting their clients’ documents. It also applies to Books, receipts, business cards, forms, applications…
Shoeboxed solves this problem for those who can’t stand piles of paper on their desks or in their pockets. You can scan, organize, and then get rid of all these very easily.
More than a productivity tool for Mortgage Brokers, Waze is an essential GPS app for those who rack up many hours and miles on the car every month. Use Waze to make sure you get anywhere on time.
The real-time alerts from other drivers about anything happening on the road makes it easy to get from point A to point B without hassle.
We come to the end of our 48+ Must-Have Productivity Tools for Mortgage Brokers list with Burner. It is a smart mobile app that lets you set up a disposable phone number that you can share with anyone without revealing your actual phone number.
Perfect for Mortgage Brokers who do not have yet a professional landline to put on their business cards or just want to protect their personal information. Once you’re done using this number fake number anymore, you can ‘burn’ it and avoid unsolicited calls.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
