The future is local: Co-marketing strategies for local growth in a consolidating industry

Dan Catinella
Absolutely, Matt.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, I mean, so we’ve got a pretty exciting topic today. We wanted to get into a little bit of the landscape going on out there in the mortgage industry and maybe broaden it a little bit, too, and talk about all of housing and what all of housing is going through right now. And it’s a lot of hot topics out there, some Rocket/Red Fins, some Compass/Zillow again, right?

So lots of stuff going on out there, but really want to dig into it and talk about what the landscape is going on, what some really cool things that Total Expert has done out there on this front, what we’re doing at Evocalize and how we might be able to get through it. 

So I’m Matthew Marx. I’m the founder and CEO of Evocalize and I’m joined by Dan Catinella. Dan, your title is Chief Lending Officer, yeah?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, so I’m the general manager over here at Total Expert. It’ll be three years in August, it’s hard to believe, but yeah, I spent my last 23 years in the lending landscape, always kind of walking the gray line between technology, sales, and marketing. So happy to be here with you and partner with our great friends at Evocalize.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, man, it’s great. Really have fun, again, doing these things with you. So let’s laugh a little bit in this thing.

So as we start to think about the topic, it’s maybe not such a laughing matter what’s going on in the industry right now. How do you think about, obviously there are a lot of topics out there as I previewed, but we really think about, we’ve been thinking a lot about and the industry has been talking a lot about the consolidation that’s happening and how some of the real estate and mortgage sides of this equation are starting to come together really for the first time. 

And you’ve been doing this a long time.You’ve been in lending much longer than I have. Can you give us a landscape of what’s happening, why now? And happy to chime in, but love to get your thoughts given how long you’ve been doing this.

Dan Catinella
Yeah, so obviously we’ve seen some pretty massive consolidation. You got Redfin, Mr. Cooper and Rocket coming together and they’re now going to own one in every six mortgages on the servicing side. Bayview and Guild, which, also two massive servicers coming together. Movoto and Lower as well.

Don’t put anything past them, really combining a lot of the real estate arm and those real estate portals with Lower’s, you know, fantastic origination engine. But I think the theme really is, is how do you really own the top of the funnel? How do you make sure, this has been this nebulous thing of customer for life.

How do you really maximize the lifetime value of every customer you acquire? So it’s not just about transacting with that customer once, but how do you get the third, fourth, fifth opportunities to serve every customer? But we’re really seeing a transition where people really want to own the top of the funnel as well.

So, how do you really get to the consumers as far up funnel as possible? Not necessarily less reliance on a real estate agent to refer you business, but just owning that funnel and that ecosystem from the very early stages of that home buyer shopping process.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, it makes sense, I guess, in a world, Dan, where Movoto, Ojo Labs, right? Partners with the Lower, you can imagine, despite signaling to the contrary, right? You can imagine that funnel starting to shift to that pipeline going down that direction.

Same thing maybe with Redfin to Rocket, which we’ve already kind of seen some of the, sounds like breadcrumbs to that effect, right?

Dan Catinella
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s exciting times and it’s making a lot of the, especially the IMBs out there that are all about, you know, their entire business models about mortgage, really rethink how they meet the customer as early up in the funnel. 

How do you get consumer insights higher up in the funnel to get to those consumers first, even before they may think about shopping on one of those real estate agent portals?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, man. Yeah, for sure. Like, I think that’s, you know, we’ve done quite a bit of research. Of course, we at Evocalize started in residential real estate and still have, the majority of our business is servicing broker brokerages with lead generation technology in the real estate space.

And you think about where, what we talk about a lot in that industry is like, how do you go get the customer to begin with, right? And we built our technology with the portals, with the Redfins and Realtor.coms and all these to go, where do they get their customers from?

And the reality is when they nurture their customers, they go to the 30 plus billion monthly visits that come to Meta, Google, and TikTok, right? Like, and that’s not even, you know, that’s not counting all the other places and all the websites and other places that people are spending time. 

But a lot of people think that, you know, the real estate portals get their traffic organically. And so you, and the same thing with the lending portals. And then you can, you know, they’re uniquely positioned to get them. They’re, they’re really kind of badass marketing machines, aren’t they? Like, isn’t that absolutely their DNA?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, how they rank in search engine optimization. And I mean, they’re, they’re number one on all that. 

And they obviously get a lot of attention and their experiences are just fantastic, right? I mean, multi-million dollars building out those experiences, those consumer grade experiences, native mobile apps to really incubate those consumers. 

But, you know, we’re seeing lenders really start to think about, you know, and reprioritize even whether you’re, whether you’re servicing and have a massive servicing book or you don’t, how do I retain that customer?

How do I make sure I’m getting in front of that customer at every opportunity there is? Not necessarily saying that you’re going to avoid them going to Zillow or going to Redfin, those fantastic experiences. But if you could stay in front of your customer at all those times, you’re going to have a much different likelihood to retain that customer when they are looking for their next purchase transaction.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, that makes kind of sense. And y’all have some pretty awesome technology. I think you call it customer intelligence that looks at some of these life signals for your existing contacts and uses them to, to get marketing in front of customers when, existing known customers, when kind of timing is right for them.

So I think to me, for the servicers and for your book of business and for the leads and contacts you already have, you obviously have to be, have to be focused in maximizing the opportunity there. First and foremost, don’t you?

Dan Catinella
Absolutely. We look at it as it’s a data arms race out there. The lenders with the most data on their consumers and the most insights, we do believe are going to win long-term.

So everybody wants to understand that a consumer at a super deep level, not three years ago when you did the last transaction, but what does Matt look like today? What is your equity position in your current home? What does your debt profile look like?

Did you get your credit pulled by another lender? The more insights I have on a consumer, the more opportunities I have to deliver the right message, the right outreach, the right email, the right SMS, have AI help originators get in front of those and follow up consistently. All those things are just critically important this day, but using data as the foundation to drive that.

Matthew Marx
Yeah. And you’re, you mentioned AI. It’s interesting.

We won’t maybe beat that horse too badly in this, in this, in this call, but I think you guys, didn’t you, Dan, didn’t you just like, you guys just introduced something pretty cool around AI calling, didn’t you?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, we did at HousingWire. We announced our AI sales assistant. And it’s really around AI voice, human-like AI voice capabilities that can help originators and kind of give them superpowers where most originators are so focused on their purchase business and nurturing their real estate agents. But they leave a lot of opportunities fall through the cracks. 

And what the AI sales assistants, one of the goals is, is as we’re surfacing these opportunities from their database, the AI sales assistant can actually do automatic outreach and continuous follow-up. You know, most originators, the best originators I talked to still only follow up with leads and new opportunities like three or four times.

Like think about this, things like the Terminator and we’ll follow up 15, 20 times with an opportunity to make sure that every customer’s outreach has a conversation, warm up the opportunity, validate the opportunity, and then really hand that back off to the licensed originator to really convert that into an application and a transaction.

Matthew Marx
Yeah. It feels to me like a big answer for scale, right? For enablement because you and I both know, right?

You can generate leads all day long, can generate great leads. You can have a lot of context in your database that are ready to go. If you don’t have the time to work them, you don’t have a dedicated team of call center folks calling them and working them, it becomes a disjointed experience.

And you just don’t do what these real estate portals and lending portals are doing, which is working the heck out of these leads to get them to come across the line, right? But again, you mentioned Movoto and Ojo Labs, if you’re not familiar with Ojo, those two merged several years ago and that’s what they were all about. It’s like, how do we nurture these leads that we’re getting in?

And so I guess, you know, without that piece, it becomes, you know, you can waste a lot of cycles and money.

Dan Catinella
The nurturing is so, I think, undervalued in our business and especially in distributed retail. I think most distributed retail originators, the top tier even, will openly admit that they’re so used to getting fed referrals from their referral partners, from their real estate agents primarily, and they convert at a very high rate. 

But when it comes to long-term nurturing, you’ve really got to have the right technology and systems in place to really do it effectively, especially, I mean, some of these nurturing cycles can last, you know, 6 to 12 months these days.

No human can really do that, to your point, at scale. So how do you use all the technology, the automation, the AI capabilities to really nurture every customer and every opportunity from your database, or if you’re buying leads, that’s a whole other scale factor for sure.

Matthew Marx
Totally, totally. Awesome. So you’ve mentioned a couple times referrals and relationships with real estate agents. So one of the things that, as we think about getting back to kind of the top of funnel, so we talk about the leads that you have, you guys are doing an awesome job of automating the way that we engage with them and nurture them, identify who to talk to when from your existing pool.

As we think about building the new pool, and we think a lot about the portals and, again, creating captive lead funnel processes in from a Redfin to a Rocket and down on the chain, right? 

If you’re a loan officer and you’re not part of that captive ecosystem, we think, we worry for the market a little bit about those drying up. And so we talked a little bit about acquiring in the portal channels where the portals are requiring leads from Meta and Google and the other places online people are spending time.

But you just talked about real estate agents and referrals, several times in the course of what, the five minutes or 10 minutes we’ve been speaking. And so can you talk about how, what are the things, I know Total Expert has some pretty longstanding, well-honed solutions around this collaboration, I will call it, between the local practitioners, your partners in the local market.

Can you tell me a little bit about how that fits into the puzzle here and how that works?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, sure. For sure. I mean, co-marketing is still a key component into driving purchase business.

Real estate agents are still the number one referral source for purchase business. I think when I started in this business 23 years ago, I think I was told then that real estate agents may be gone in the next couple of years.

Matthew Marx
Everyone forecasts that every few years, right?

Dan Catinella
Every couple of years. But the reality is real estate agents still drive the vast majority of purchase business, even with all the digital technology that we have out there today. But co-marketing is such a key component for lenders to lean into, to really support their real estate agent partners, generate assets—

Whether that’s print and social content, whether that’s things like bringing flyers to open houses to support and market that listing for their real estate agents, or even a digital artifact, whether that’s trying to capture homebuyers as they’re walking into some of their new listings and making sure that you’re incubating and nurturing those relationships. I mean, open houses right now are a huge opportunity for originators.

And I still talk to way too many that aren’t leveraging that, but there is a physical presence there. If you’ve got a whole bunch of potential homebuyers that are walking into open houses, obviously they’re in the market. 

And real estate agents out there, they’re still taking names on paper, but our technology can help them digitize that, bring that into the CRM automatically, and then automatically nurture those potential homebuyers and share those contacts with the real estate agents so that everybody has visibility to those potential mutual prospects.

But it’s also a great way to open new doors for new real estate agents to do business with you where maybe their current lender isn’t providing them some of these tools. So, let me build some collateral on a new listing that I just saw you have and put that in front of a potential real estate agent and say, Hey, this is some of the things I’m doing for my partners. Let me show you how I can support your business as well.

So, there’s a whole plethora of co-marketing capabilities. Our platform enables lenders to really leverage and lean into to grow market share and wallet share of existing real estate agent relationships. How do I get more business out of every real estate agent that I have a relationship with?

And then how can I go use this to attract new real estate agents to get widening my net and add more referral partners to my network?

Matthew Marx
Yeah. Dan, it strikes me. Obviously, you have had a longstanding co-marketing, as you just described, functionality in there for this collaboration that we talked about. It’s so critical for the industry.

But with the industry consolidation, one of the things that you know, we’ve recently announced our co-marketing network, which allows a digital collaboration for lead generation and advertising in a RESPA compliant way with real estate agents and loan officers. And we’re building out more and more capabilities for discovery there, so we can matchmake.

We have hundreds of thousands of realtors that use our system already, and tens of thousands of loan officers. And so, we’re bringing those two together. 

And I wonder, and by the way, just before I hit this self-serving comment, like one of the cool things about our relationship and our partnership is when those leads get generated, they can automatically get sent into the Total Expert ecosystem through our prebuilt integration and build these audiences, trigger customer intelligence, trigger journeys, trigger nurturing, trigger AI calling.

So, all that can just be seamless and turnkey for the loan officers out there. But I think, again, about the partnership that exists in the real world that we’re helping facilitate and move into the digital world, Dan, and I wonder if with the industry consolidation…

Like one of the things I’ve heard from loan officers, I was at a Guild Mortgages Conference a couple of weeks ago talking with 300 of the top loan officers out there. And one of the things that I heard over and over again is, hey, Matt, this isn’t just important because it’s a 50-50 cost split or because it’s a cost split of some kind and because it’s compliant, it’s because it’s easy.

This presents a unified picture to my neighborhood and makes this look turnkey, just like a Redfin and a Rocket may present itself to a local neighborhood. But now I can pair up with my business partner in each neighborhood around the town, around the city, around the state and really look like a team that make it easy.

And I wonder if it’s just the first time I’ve heard that talked about. And I wonder, you guys have been in this for a long time. I wonder if that’s part of the feedback you hear too.

Dan Catinella
Absolutely. I mean, especially for first time homebuyers, the home buying process is just complex and filled with just friction points all over the place. And there’s a lot of parties involved.

But if you can, any way you can combine real estate and mortgage together into a single experience, especially for first time homebuyers that are unfamiliar with the process and who does what in that process between your real estate agent and your loan officer, it just cuts down on that friction.

So, I think it’s a great thing, especially we know where first time homebuyers, especially the younger generations are existing in social channels. And that’s where they like to get educated and see that content. So, I think our partnership has never been more relevant than it is these days.

Matthew Marx
It’s kind of interesting, Dan, you think about first time homebuyers and getting people into the market. Obviously, we’ve had an affordability challenge, hopefully that isn’t as, hopefully rates starts to drop. But even in the current environment, we’re seeing it on the real estate side.

We’re seeing listings start to unlock a little bit and inventory rise a little bit. And it’s bumpy, it’s going to be bumpy, but we’re seeing that start to happen. So, it feels like, and talking with some of my friends, CEOs at different brokerages and some of our partners, it sounds like, I mean, we all kind of hesitate to say it and knock on this fake wood, but they’re starting to feel like there’s a little bit of an unlock coming out of the woodwork, right?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, for sure. I mean, listen, inventories, I don’t know that I want to say is back to normal, but much, much better than we’ve seen since the pandemic or pretty close to pre-pandemic levels. And we are seeing prices normalize.

I’m not sure, outside of Florida and Texas, we’re seeing a whole lot of pricing declines, but there’s definitely some more negotiations going on out there. And yeah, I mean, listen, if rates go down to 6%, I think this market heats up pretty darn quickly. I think the demand is there.

And I think first-time homebuyers and the younger generations that are trying to get into the housing market are probably at the biggest disadvantage right now. But I think if rates dropped down a little bit, I think they’re in a much better position.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, totally agree. And to your point about social, we do a lot. Google Search has been kind of a foundation of lead generation for a long time. We still do a lot of that for loan officers and lenders. 

But if you think about where folks are spending time and interacting, a lot of it’s starting to be out there with videos and short-form videos. TikTok has introduced, I know it’s scary for some of the more seasoned people like me with gray hair in the industry, but man, my 18-year-old daughter, she starts her search in TikTok for everything.

So she’s looking for apartment, college living, and she’s searching in TikTok. And TikTok now, in fact, I met with some of the folks here in Austin this morning from TikTok, and they released a really cool search product where you can get, it’s not Google Search, it’s TikTok search. 

It’s like, I’m searching for, and you start to think about homes and the sexiness of a home and how it can fit into a TikTok environment and a Reels environment and stories environment, Instagram. We start to think about a whole different world. 

And even that’s not even talking about the generative AI that we can start to get into through ChatGPT and others through that process. So really kind of interesting world versus the linear funnel that we had where people just do a Google Search, end up at a portal because they dominate the top handful of listings and then just go through the process that way, right?

Dan Catinella
Yeah, absolutely. I think the whole search concept is going to be totally disrupted by AI. I mean, some of the stats I’m already seeing are just insane of how many, the algorithms of how many people are actually searching on Google versus even ChatGPT now. It’s starting to actually surpass some of the Google metrics. 

It’s kind of crazy to see how search is going to be changing. I mean, we’re going to be talking here in a couple of years and probably saying, remember when we used to actually type in things to search into Google to find things and then it would just be like hyperlinks to actually the website versus actually just surfacing the content you were looking for?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, totally. And the thing is you don’t show up in those generative AI windows. You don’t show up unless you’re doing all these things to get out there and get visible.

So a lot of people don’t think about that. It’s paying even small amounts to be out there and get distribution. That’s where folks are picking, that’s where the generative AI picks up the signals to put you and insert you in as the local expert.

It’s how often are you out there? How visible are you out there? And then regardless of whether you do it, whether you do it through Metas AI and Instagram or Facebook, whether you’re doing it in TikTok AI and TikTok search or ChatGPT or Google Gemini, it doesn’t matter, right?

All of those are picking up the same signals at the end of the day. So yeah, pretty important to be out there. Well, Dan, I don’t know what you think, if there are any closing thoughts that on this subject you want to leave the crew with, but I felt pretty good.

We wanted to keep this quick and short and to the point. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think the era as the maybe market recovers a little from housing and we’ve got this, it’s kind of an exciting time with housing coming together and yeah, there’s going to be some competition, maybe new angles and new ways of doing things. 

But for folks who are willing to adjust, willing to try new things, willing to adapt, feels like kind of a fun time that hopefully we’re going into in the industry. I don’t know. That’s kind of what I’m getting. I don’t know what you feel.

Dan Catinella
A hundred percent. I think we’re seeing more lenders lean into understanding that data has to be a first-class citizen at your company and what are the channels that you need to communicate in with your customers. 

And if you’re not communicating out in social, obviously right now you have a pretty big gap, especially when you get into that younger generation, because that is where they are spending the vast majority of their time.

So it’s one of the reasons why I’m super passionate about our partnership together is we really have built together a turnkey solution to enable that for every originator out there, because we still know the average age of originator is floating around 48 plus years old. 

And listen, not many are very social experts out there. So if we can provide more turnkey solutions to enable those originators, it just has produced so much positive results for their business that it’s pretty exciting to see the direction. 

And the vision of your company, at Evocalize and playing in the digital ad landscape and some of the exciting things you’re doing with this co-marketing capability. I’m digging it.

Matthew Marx
Thanks, man. I’m digging the partnership. And I think as we think about it, how are you out there through your co-marketing and how do we make the whole, I think the goal and what we’re doing and getting even better at through AI calling and some other things is like, how do you set up the whole funnel?

So it just rocks and rolls and you don’t have to know how the sausage is being made. You press the button and it starts a sequence of events that keeps running month after month after month and becomes your own personal lead generation portal. You get a Redfin for your own market that you can throw in your pocket and you don’t even have to pay $2 billion for it.

It’s like, it just runs and your lenders equipped you with the most modern tools to make that happen. And you get ROI out the other end. I mean, that’s the other beautiful thing with some of our partners together.

We published some case studies, I think you have too on one of our partners, certainly not the only one, but Guaranteed Rate and some of the ROI can quantify the incrementality of this stuff at a pretty high level. And all of a sudden, it becomes a great answer to the consolidation that’s happening out there as far as I’m concerned.

Dan Catinella
Yeah. Listen, I mean, you can’t always show clear ROI with every marketing investment. Our partnership is a pretty clear bullseye for ROI and it tells a pretty clear story.

So it’s great to see some of the large, medium, and even small lenders adopt this technology and see the success that we’ve had over the short period of time that we’ve had the partnership in place.

Matthew Marx
100%.

Dan Catinella
Take it to the sky, buddy.

Matthew Marx
Let’s go, baby. All right, y’all. Thanks for joining us.

I’m really excited. Thank you to Dan Catinella and the Total Expert team for giving us some time with Dan. His time’s hard to get.

So thanks, Dan, for spending time with us. And yeah, I’m Matt, y’all. Check out Total Expert if you’re not already on their platform and check out Evocalize.

If either of us can help, I’m sure we are happy to do so. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate the time. 

Dan Catinella
Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.