Mortgage leads starting out

[Smithers82]

I’m currently a mortgage advisor with a bank and I’m seriously considering moving into brokering with the eventuality of becoming self employed and having my own business in a few years. My question is to people who have done this already; where on earth do you start out to get mortgage leads?
I’ve worked for brokers previously but one was massive and had a huge online presence and the other was smaller but evolved from a leads generation business, they did use other mortgage lead generation companies as well to build up their business but didn’t rely solely upon them because the quality was scatty. I’ll have some cash saved that I can get to CAS status, and can survive 6 months without being paid but where to start on leads just baffles me.

 

[AllUpHere]

Its called marketing, and for mortgage leads it's really not difficult. Its one of those industries in which your potential clients are predictable and follow very specific patterns of behaviour. They may as well walk around carrying a sign saying I'm just about to need a mortgage.

 

[Smithers82]

I have never done marketing in my life. Do you just mean Facebook, Twitter, flyers etc

 

[tony84]

You should already have CAS I assume?

Join an existing company who can provide leads and top them up over time with your own. If you are under another firm, you are going to be limited to what you can do anyway. You wont be able to do your own website, you will need them to agree to any marketing and to sign it off, leads are poor at best.

Realistically, it is going to take you 3 years or so before you are in a position of generating enough leads to pay the bills (it was for me anyway).

 

[Smithers82]

Yes I’m already CAS where I work.

Ok I think I understand now thanks for that. So I basically would have to go self employed under another company for a few years and slowly build my own book as well as the companies until I have enough to go on my own. Sounds like it’s going to be a huge struggle for few years but I bet it’s worth it in the end.

And do you mean the leads from the company I go self employed with are going to be bad leads?

 

[tony84]

I meant leads from lead generation sites are poor at best. If you are getting them from an employer they should be better.

You may be able to do it quicker than 2-3 years, but it took me a while.

 

[Smithers82]

Cheers that’s a great idea. I just couldn’t think how on Earth anyone could build up enough leads in a short space of time to support paying bills but that’s the thing isn’t it it’s built up over a few years and you work for someone else in the meantime

 

[FD Capital]

I expect that anything online would be very competitive and therefore unrealistic to crack quickly. There are plenty of networking groups which may be a good way to start, I picked up some work this way for a business I ran - though it was mostly an opportunity to socialise and eat breakfasts!

 

[Ukdude858]

Have you thought of google Adwords. This is ideal for this kind of business model. Lead generation. How I would go about it is to create a simple one page website. It would be a high converting Landing page. Your potential customers would fill out their details. You can call them back for a booking