Wholesale has had a tough couple of months, but looks like June was a little happier in the broker/wholesaler world. After last month’s 20% drop, wholesale volume picked up a bit in June, growing just north of 8% to 4,623 units, with trailing 12 month volume coming in at 60,448.
There is a new #1 in the wholesale world this month – Metlife. (We like to think it’s because they use our Wholesale Analytics Report to help manage their wholesale business.) With 919 wholesale units, Metlife was far above #2 World Alliance (745) and #3 Bank of America (697). Though its not at the Freedom or JB Nutter levels of the past (yet?), it’s still an accomplishment worth mentioning.
The question, of course, is how did they do it? It’s no secret that they have a very nice fixed rate product offering that is winning over lots of business and that’s leading to many successes in volume and capture rate.
Beyond sheer volume, we like to focus on things like customer capture – defined as the percentage of loans your brokers do through your company. If you look at the bottom left of page 2 on this report, you’ll see Metlife’s customer capture was 28% — not very impressive compared to JB Nutter or Financial Freedom (44% and 38%, respectively). But that’s a trailing 12 month look. If we look at the trailing 3 months, Metlife came in at 40%, and in the most recent month, their capture hit 49%.
While this doesn’t tell the whole story, it’s certainly one of the key components to their recent success. If you are a wholesale lender, one thing you should focus on is earning more of your customers’ business. (In fact, we strongly believe that this metric is one of the 3 key measures to base bonus pay structure on – think of it as the customer loyalty/happiness thermometer. Contact us for more information.)
