Real Estate Investment Lending runs on communications. As an experienced REI Lender, you know that it's important to keep in touch with investors so in order to remain top of mind when they are need of a loan.
One of the challenges around being an active REI Lender is the "dark list" problem.
There are only so many hours in a day. REI Lenders usually spend their time contacting the top 20% of their client list as those are the ones that produce 80% of their business. The other 80% of your list doesn't get much if any attention. This leaves the onus on 80% of your past clients to get in touch with you when in need of a loan. This creates a "dark list" scenario.
How to Brighten Up Your Dark Investor List
In many ways, an unpredictable investor list is bad for your business. It also doesn't allow you to generate the business insights you need to really keep up and compete. It’s like someone ringing your doorbell without announcing that they’re going to stop by. It might be a pleasant surprise, but you would have benefited from a heads-up!
If you’re a REI Lender with a set of dark list investors, you don’t know if they’re working hard on finding deals, or just sunning themselves in the Caribbean! Or, maybe they are getting money from other sources….?
For REI Lenders that want to work efficiently, data is everything. When you have up-front information about investor activity, you can track what your investors are likely to want and when they are likely to want it. You can adjust your business outreach strategy accordingly.
When you don't have that luxury, you miss out on important branding, relationship opportunities and loans.
This is exactly where investor database software comes into play to help you identify your key investor metrics, find meaningful stories in your sea of data, and actually grow your business.
Essential Investor Metrics for REI Lenders
Think about the kinds of relationships that you could have with investors if you could see visually:
- What properties they're looking at
- How they are evaluating neighborhoods
- How they are responding to your marketing and outreach
That's one particular thing that the Privy platform offers savvy REI Lenders. Using our high-value real estate data platform, you can keep track of which of your investors are actively pursuing investments and are most likely to be needing a loan in the near future.
With this kind of functionality in place, it's almost like you have a crystal ball for impending deals. You can make follow-up calls and often get investors who are really thinking on the same wavelength – because you are ready know the general directions they are moving in!
All of this is immensely important in deal-making. It's easy to really heat up your investor base and pursue more specialized real estate transactions by tracking investor activity with our dashboard.
But that's not everything that Privy offers REI Lenders as professional networkers.
How to Use Investor Database Software Starting Now
Inside of Privy business intelligence dashboards, there are also done-for-you marketing and co-branding opportunities, where you can reach out directly through the platform with messaging that shows your particular brand and promotes your office as a an active partner and thought leader in the industry. When you are able to combine insight into investor activity with branded, effective outreach:
- Your “time-to-deal” goes down
- Your efficiency soars
- You go beyond the low-hanging fruit to make deals that worked on the data you saw for yourself
In the end, many of the most successful REI Lenders who make the most profits know that closer relationships with investors pay off over time.
Having investor data in hand and acting on it brings incredible return on investment.
Otherwise, you're basically flying in the dark – when you get those calls out of the blue, it can take a tremendous amount of research to catch up. By that time, you may have missed a lucrative opportunity.
Your Next Steps
Without the sort of transparency that Privy delivers, it’s easy to fall into that trap of compiling dark list clients, never knowing what most of your investor base is doing, and just spinning your wheels, waiting to hear from these “silent partners.”
Instead, with proactive deal-making, you build the relationships and enjoy a better reputation in your investor base.
See for yourself what Privy can do for your hard money lending business by exploring the tool now, or download our free comparison guide to evaluating the right REI tool for you:
