How mortgage professionals stay connected to clients for life and secure future transactions
The mortgage industry has one of the worst customer retention rates around. According to recent estimates, originators today barely hold on to 20% of their past customers. For comparison, people switch cars just about as frequently, every eight to ten years, and 53% of them buy the same brand.
This means originators are essentially starting from scratch with every mortgage, refinance, or home equity loan application instead of capitalizing on existing relationships.
Thankfully, there are new ways for mortgage professionals to remain connected to their clients and stay top-of-mind — and they don’t involve nagging them with constant sales pitches. Before we review what those exciting new solutions are and how they can make a difference, it’s important to understand why retention is so poor in the industry.
The roots of poor customer retention
The traditional originator-borrower relationship has always been transactional. According to LendingTree, 54% of homebuyers today (especially older buyers) do business with the first originator they come across because they’re short on time, the originator was recommended by their real estate agent, or they’ve convinced themselves that they won’t get a better offer.
After closing on their new home, homebuyers get busy settling in and quickly forget who lent them the money, especially when they make automatic payments or their mortgage gets sold in the secondary market. Mortgage originators, for their part, are staring at a long sales cycle and quickly turn their attention to new clients to meet short-term sales targets. Most of them don’t have the resources to invest in long-term marketing, they lose track of their clients’ evolving needs, and by the time they recognize that a past client is in-market for a new loan, it’s often too late. Another originator has swooped in.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) just ranked 45 consumer industries (from restaurants to banks and airlines), and mortgage originators brought up the rear along with services like utilities, gas stations, and hospitals — things people sign up for because they have to, not because they want to.
That leaves a lot of room for improvement.
The cost of poor customer retention
Starting from scratch with every transaction is costly. Loyalty experts have found that financial services firms that increased customer retention by a modest 5% can boost profitability at least 25%. Over the years, marketers have interpreted those figures to mean that it costs 5X more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer, and most of them now recognize the wisdom of investing in building long-term relationships with existing clients.
Another way to look at the value of customer retention is by analyzing the impact of long-term marketing. Nielsen, the media measurement company, reviewed thousands of marketing campaigns across multiple sectors a few years ago and came to two important conclusions: first, that long-term marketing efforts account for 10%-35% of a brand’s equity; and second, a 1-point gain in top-funnel brand metrics (like awareness and consideration) increases sales by 1%.
Unfortunately, many originators struggle with long-term marketing. But new solutions are now on the market to help them better balance their marketing strategies and meet the needs of their existing client base.
OneHomeowner: Nurturing lifetime relationships with homeowners
OneHomeowner™ by Cotality™, the newest addition to the Araya™ platform, harnesses powerful, accurate data to help mortgage originators drive opportunities for repeat business. Nurturing relationships doesn’t have to be a guessing game anymore. With white label customization, predictive analytics, and automated touchpoints for clients, originators can now take control of more lending opportunities.
A lifetime client management tool, OneHomeowner keeps mortgage originators connected to their clients throughout the length of their mortgage, and beyond. Mortgage originators use it to gain access to real-time data on home value, equity, and market trends, and they can turn that data into strategic insights to assist their clients proactively. Plus, consistent, branded communication stops being a burden and becomes an opportunity to build lasting engagement with their clients.
Homeowners, for their part, receive a suite of powerful tools and resources with OneHomeowner. After they’re invited to the platform by their lender or broker, they log on to a private portal where they can store key documents and get reminders of important home management tasks, access to cost estimates from half a million professional home service providers, and regular home value and home equity updates.
Backed by Cotality’s leading property data, insights and technology solutions, OneHomeowner makes client retention transparent and intuitive for originators.
It’s never been more important to invest in the right retention tech
Over the past couple of years, high interest rates and climbing home prices have made it incredibly challenging for many would-be buyers to afford a new home. The housing market seemed headed in the right direction in late 2024, but consumer sentiment is dropping in early 2025, with consumers now expecting inflation to rebound, according to a recent survey from the University of Michigan.
The seesaws of the 10-year Treasury yield over the past few months and economic uncertainties are making it very difficult for consumers to plan for the future. The Mortgage Bankers Association has just lowered its refinancing forecast for the year.
That’s where a platform like OneHomeowner can make a world of difference.
In its 2024 U.S. Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study, J.D. Power found that “[originators] that play an active advisory role in helping their clients navigate the current market are earning significantly higher customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy scores than those that are treating mortgage lending as a transactional process.” It also found that satisfaction is 107 points higher (on a 1,000-points scale) “when [originators] engage early with customers, connecting with them when they are first thinking about purchasing a home” rather than when they’re getting ready to apply for a mortgage.
Timing is everything. Please get in touch today and we’ll show you what OneHomeowner can do for your business.
About Araya
Cotality’s Property & Location Intelligence platform transforms your workflow by blending extensive data with advanced analytics and predictive models, for a complete and cohesive understanding of the market.
- Actively engage with homeowners to drive retention and build long-lasting relationships.
- Easily navigate market, portfolio, and property information on a single platform.
- Access historical data and forward-looking insights with predictive analytics.
- Get industry news and a suite of curated solutions, all in one place.
- Work quickly with an intuitive user interface.
About Cotality
Cotality accelerates data, insights and workflows across the property ecosystem to enable industry professionals to surpass their ambitions and impact society. With billions of real-time data signals across the life cycle of a property, we unearth hidden risks and transformative opportunities for agents, lenders, carriers and innovators.
For more information, please visit www.cotality.com.
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Irvine, CA 92618
This material may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Cotality. For more information, visit Cotality.com or call 866.774.3282.
©2025 Cotality. All rights reserved. Cotality™, the Cotality logo, CLIP, ARAYA, and Intelligence beyond bounds™ are the trade marks of CoreLogic, Inc. d/b/a Cotality or its affiliates or subsidiaries.
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