How Lenders Can Attract Millennial Borrowers
The average consumer's attention lasts just eight seconds. This means that you have less than eight seconds to state your case, communicate potential benefits, and make a sale. In today’s fast paced world of endless information and instant gratification, that eight seconds has become even more important in lending, especially for first time Millennial home buyers.
Whether a customer is looking for their very first home, or refinancing to shop for better interest rates, making the mortgage approval process fast and easy is as important for the home-buyer as it is for the lender. Millennials are used to things happening fast, so the digitization and modernization of mortgage lending is about answering the when and how instead of the if.
Millennials generally favor less touch points than their predecessors. Millennials and by extension, Gen Z, are used to getting their information online, so they generally require less face-to-face interaction to understand what’s going on. What used to be done in person over a handshake and a stack of paperwork is now more likely to happen entirely online. Savvy lenders in today’s market must learn the balance between these very different generations of buyers to stay ahead of the game. Borrowers are increasingly demanding faster lending decisions and transparency into how those decisions are made. They are also pushing for a customized approach to their particular situation, requiring more ways to showcase their reliability outside of your standard traditional credit report.
When a customer signs up for a credit card, the decision can be made in seconds, often pulling data from multiple sources. This same practice can be used in mortgage lending. Regardless of a borrower’s age and preferred method of contact with their lender, leveraging multiple data sets to determine credit worthiness is a good business practice. No longer are buyers deemed worthy or unworthy of a mortgage simply due to their credit score — other factors like employment history and income verification are starting to come into play.
Pulling all of this data can take a lot of time, which is why Truework partners with various HR software companies and financial industry leaders to efficiently get the right information, right when you need it. We use multiple APIs to crunch the numbers quickly, in some cases even offering pre-approval for potential home-buyers. This turns that eight second attention span for a decision from an impossibility into a probability.
At the end of the day, lenders are looking for reliable payers, and potential home-buyers are looking for lending decisions to hopefully be made before they retire. Making mortgage lending as seamless, easy, and quick as possible will attract more Millennial borrowers and get them out of the endless verification process and into their new home.
