double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

What do you think, any reason why the Senate shouldn’t pass H.R. 1852 (listed below)?

How does this fall in with Bush’s feelings:

“I plan to help homeowners, the government’s got a role to play,” Bush said. “But it’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who made the decision to buy a home they couldn’t afford.”

Sounds like a “bail out” to me, wouldn’t you agree?

I think the plan seems to be a win win for the people facing foreclosure, for the mortgage industry and for the economy as a whole. Getting the mortgage and housing industries back on track can only bolster the economy. Or is that true? I thought the rate cuts were a positive move fort he economy, but at least one source disagrees.

“Despite Fed cuts, mortgage rates rise. The Federal Reserve’s recent bid to boost the economy by cutting interest rates has apparently backfired when it comes to mortgages.” (Check out the entire article)

Is the fate of the industry truly in the hands of the government, and are they up for the task?

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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PASSES H.R. 1852 MAKING IT EASIER TO OBTAIN FHA LOANS IF THE SENATE FOLLOWS SUIT

FACTS

The new law will enable FHA to serve more subprime borrowers at affordable rates and terms, recapture borrowers that have turned to predatory loans in recent years, and offer refinancing loan opportunities to borrowers struggling to meet their mortgage payments in the midst of the current turbulent mortgage markets. The bill contains the following important points for you the mortgage broker:

â?¢ Lower down payments. Authorizes zero and lower down payment loans for borrowers that can afford mortgage payments, but lack the cash for a required down payment.

â?¢ Housing counseling. Authorizes more than double the current funding level for housing counseling, to help subprime homebuyers and borrowers late on mortgage loan payments.

â?¢ Subprime borrowers. Directs FHA to provide mortgage loans to higher risk (but qualified) borrowers, without authorizing unnecessary fee hikes on such borrowers.

â?¢ Reverse mortgages. Helps seniors pay for health and other expenses, by removing the loan cap to avoid program shutdowns, raising loan limits, and by reducing the maximum fee lenders can charge for these loans.

â?¢ Multifamily loans. Raises FHA multifamily loan limits, so these loans can fully fund construction costs in high cost areas, and enhances sale of foreclosed FHA rental housing loans to localities, so that affordable housing can be maintained in local communities.

â?¢ Affordable housing fund. Authorizes up to $300 million a year from the bill’s excess profits for affordable housing, instead of returning such funds to the General Treasury.

â?¢ Higher loan limits. Adopts the Frank/Miller/Cardoza amendment that would raise FHA single family loan limits, which now bar loans above 95% of the median home price in each local area and shut FHA out of higher cost home markets. The amendment raises the FHA loan limit in each area to the lower of (a) 125% of the local area median home price or (b) 175% of the national GSE conforming loan limit. The amendment also retains the bill’s provision for a nationwide FHA loan floor of 65% of the GSE conforming loan limit, and gives HUD authority to raise these loan limit amounts by up to $100,000 “if market conditions warrant.’

â?¢ Directs FHA to make available refinancing loans to existing qualified homeowners who are in default or at risk of default due to rate resets or mortgage market conditions, and to authorize lower down payments for such purpose. The amendment also includes provisions to address problems arising from inflated appraisals.

Last week, Geosemble, a geospatial data integration company launched a new lead generation service that uses a satellite program (similar to Google Earth) to generate highly targeted sales leads. Here’s how it works: the satellite takes its images and identifies houses with swimming pools, driveways and roofs in need of repair, empty backyards, etc.  The data is cross-referenced with city parcel data to find name, address, and phone number information that corresponds with the property, and that information is then sold to manufacturers and service providers for those items: swimming pool maintenance,  lawn furniture manufacturers, home improvement contractors; anyone that would be interested enough in that information to pay for it. The development of the technology was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation– part of the U.S. Federal Government….

So now this gets me thinking…although the concept is arguably genius, is it ethical to sell information gathered from pictures the customer doesn’t even know are being taken? To me, it evokes an image of a private investigator, taking unauthorized photos from behind a bush and reporting back to his client with juicy details of the subject’s life.

When it comes to satellite-generated sales leads, is it an invasion of privacy or just public information?

Post By
Sean Fenlon

Your thoughts on the:

• Market
• Credit Market
• Mortgage Market
• Leads Market
• Mortgage Leads Market
• Lead Generation Market
• Live Leads Market

Please submit your thoughts.

SPF

Post By
Sean Fenlon

Industry Leaders (Lead Sellers AND Lead Buyers) Gather to Discuss Ways to Increase the Value and Effectiveness of Internet Leads

The leaders in the Internet Leads movement gathered in Vegas last week at
The Palms.  I attended the event along with our CTO Syed Zaidi, and our SVP Brian Ocheltree.  Ironically, we found ourselves on the same floor as Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors during their warm-up for a bout on stage at The Palms – quite a distraction with this highly-competitive crew.

:-)

Wednesday Sessions

The two-day conference began on Wednesday 9/19.  This was a travel day for most of the participants, thus arrivals were sporadic.  The conference began with breakout sessions despite the effects of disparate arrival times.  With this smart design, attendees were not forced to miss the special Keynote Sessions scheduled for Thursday as a result of their travel time on Wednesday.

Techniques and Strategies for Increasing Enrollments
Craig McGuinn, COO of DegreeStreet.com (Ward Media)
Angela Siegel, Marketing Manager, Grand Canyon University

Craig and Angela did an outstanding job of tag-teaming a presentation from both the perspective of the lead seller (DegreeStreet.com) and the lead buyer (Grand Canyon University).  One of the concepts they reinforced was to look beyond the Cost-per-Enrollment of a new student and into the retention rates and graduation rates of the students.  This concept made a number of the audience members somewhat curious and they felt that the effectiveness of the performance feedback loop would be compromised by the extended timeline of the milestone.  In other words, a number of audience members were convinced that things change so quickly that conclusions from longer-cycle performance indicators would lead to moot conclusions.  Overall, however, both Craig and Angela demonstrated a deep understanding and desire to measure as many dimension as possible in order to optimize lead flow and the underlying campaigns.

Building the Right Formula for ROI
Laura Lewellyn, Senior Data Analyst, TARGUSinfo

Laura walked through a case study of an anonymous Online Education company by segmenting lead performance into deciles.  The analysis provided an interesting philosophical concept to consider.  Should a lead-buying organization optimize for pure conversion rate or should a lead-buying organization optimize for a pure profit through-put.  In other words, should a lead buyer cut off any lead source below, say, 7%, or should a lead buyer continue to buy leads from any source so long as they were making at least $1 more than what it had cost them (fully-loaded). 

Laura also looked at the first-call-close dimension, which was very interesting to me.  Clearly, a lead source that can provide a significant percentage of closes on the first contact is a high-octane lead source and will result in significant cost savings with respect to “follow up” resources be applied in order to close the deal on subsequent calls.  This concept is the closest I encountered to my concern about labor costs seldom being factored in the cost structures in ROI calculations. 

Laura later explained to me that TARGUSinfo provides this type of detailed analysis for free as part of their consultative and value-add sales process.  TARGUSinfo customers should take full advantage of this as it could most certainly stand alone as hourly-based consulting contracts in the future.

George Moore
CEO & Founder, TARGUSinfo
Official Opening Remarks

On Thursday morning, TARGUSinfo founder and CEO George Moore delivered the official opening remarks for the conference.  George announced that TARGUSinfo (after being built “brick-by-brick” without external funding) had achieved a $100MM run rate, and was growing 20% per year.  This is a fantastic achievement and milestone, and a testament to the TARGUSinfo team.  The majority of their revenue continues to come from their Caller-ID, Dealer-locator, and other real-time telephone services, but they are clearly bullish about the interactive leads until of their business as an important growth center.  George clearly acknowledged the growth opportunities of real time data services via the Internet.

Opening Keynote
The Rise of Online Conversion Marketing
Ian Smith (Managing Director, Allen & Co.) & Matt Coffin (former CEO, LowerMyBills.com)

The opening keynote address began with Ian Smith, Managing Director of Allen & Co.  Ian is legendary in the Internet leads M&A ecosystem, having managed the process of the sale of Lending Tree, Advertising.com, LowerMyBills.com, and NexTag.  Ian provided a historical overview of the evolution of the leads ecosystem with particular emphasis on LowerMyBills.com, including selecting historical examples of LowerMyBills.com innovative display advertisements (stretched animals, the suicidal ginger-bread man, etc.)

In one diagram, Ian posed the question: are publishers (portals, content/destination sites, etc.) moving upstream to compete with the very companies that currently buy their inventory today? 

[Personally, I believe the answer is a simple one.  It all comes down to eCPM.  Publishers almost always prefer to sell their inventory on a non-performance-based (CPM) model.  If the CPMs that they are able to command using the efficiency of the various exchanges (Right Media, CPX Exchange, DoubleClick Exchange, etc.) is significantly lower than the EFFECTIVE CPM (eCPM) of selling using a performance-based delivery model such as CPA/CPL, they will indeed move upstream in an attempt to capture additional value.]

Since 50% or more of advertising sales are reportedly from non-performance-based brand advertisements, I, like Ian, do not see the publishers moving upstream anytime soon.  Quite simply, “the juice just aint worth the squeezin’” for them at this time.

Ian then invited Matt Coffin up for a fireside chat (without the actual fire).

One of the things Matt Coffin clarified early in his discussion was that “Lead Generation is NOT a Value Proposition.”  I could not agree more.  Matt went on to predict massive innovation in the Lead Generation space based upon competitive pressures as well as the economic reality as a result of a drastically affected mortgage leads ecosystem.  But Matt was definitely betting on the innovators and entrepreneurs in the audience, which warmed my heart.  He did also warn entrepreneurs that whatever it is they are doing better bring significant value to the consumer or else the model will ultimately fail.

During the Q&A session with Ian Smith and Matt, former CEO of Experian Interactive, Ed Ojdana, was handed the microphone and asked Matt “What was the biggest/best lesson learned now that you’ve stepped away from LowerMyBills.com and have a fresh perspective” (or something of that effect).

Matt took his time to gather his thoughts before responding emphatically – “I need to break the answer up into pieces.  First, TEAM MATTERS.”  Matt went on to recount that all the great success of LowerMyBills.com have be attributed back to the addition on new rock star team members, and that the technology and the vision alone could not have produced the same results as the people.  Secondly, Matt described a culture that passionately-analytical and poured over key metrics, and would quickly “double-down” on what was working at the time in order to continue to accelerate growth. 

[Matt’s advice was quite apropos as I witnessed him later in the evening doubling-down at the blackjack table with almost eerie sense of what the next card will be – to the cheers of the folks around the table.

IAB Marketer & Agency Guide to Lead Quality

Prior to this session, attendees were provided a multi-page IAB Marketer & Agency Guide to Lead Quality, a great handout but did not include anything DoublePositive was not already incorporating.

Terrence Thomas, CMO, eLearners.com

After the break, excellent presentation by Terrence on how to attract potential students to your educational institution.

Striking a Balance Between Branding and Lead Generation
Josh Perlstein, President, Response Media

Many described Josh’s presentation as the most insightful, as there were very few brand marketers in the audience.  All I can say is that even toothpaste manufacturers buy leads.

Awards

Just before lunch, two awards were presented for Online Marketing Excellence.  The Awards were presented to David Behn, Cole & Weber, and Matt Wells, LowerMyBills.com.  Based upon Dave Wengel’s intro, it sound as though both are way beyond well-deserving of such awards.

Dave Wengel

Dave Wengel  was the most-present presenter during the second half of Thursday (delivering a similar presentation to both lead sellers and lead buyers).  Dave also provided excellent closing remarks at the end of the conference.
 

Our research into the Debt vertical is ongoing, so I’m always happy to share when I come across something that I think provides insight into this “five-year young” industry.

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Breaking the Generational Chain of Debt: One step at a time.

“Tragedy can strike anybody, and the results can be devastating”, says Jeff Boulton, President of Rise Above Debt Relief.

“It is discouraging to see how credit cards are exploiting all age groups and demographics. People just don’t know or have a solution.” It is no secret the number of individuals incurring higher debt loads is increasing daily. What motivates Boulton is the ability to do something about it.

“The industry would be better served to continue to educate those that just don’t understand their options. People are uneducated”, states Boulton. Boulton sees and is saddened by the chain of family members in debt and the capitulation by the industry in general to help out.

“It is clear that if a company spends the time and truly cares about their prospect, that the generational chain of bad credit failure can be broken, once and for all.”

“We see entire families driven to debt based upon permissive business rules and lack of understanding.” Boulton believes that demand for Debt services is so great that there will never really be a shortage of clients to help. Boulton doesn’t pass judgment on any Debt Settlement company and understands that most truly do care about their client needs. He would like to see and hear across the industry that everyone truly is in the business to help the prospect instead of the quick sale.

“I’d like to see all debt settlement companies seeking to listen in detail and assist their clients in such a way to provide a better standard of living.” When asked, what exactly he would expect from the average company, Boulton replied,

“Fundamental principles such as budgeting, understanding responsibility as a credit card holder, and the ability to manage cash flow are all imperative to getting out of debt.” These seem like simple principles but it is common for a client to be dis-engaged in the process.

“We continue to see the upward tick of the number of individuals in debt and the average debt load.” Boulton does believe a sea of opportunity does exist for his clients. Based on the changes, he feels he can actually afford to take on a true client services solution. Boulton believes that all debt settlement companies have plenty of opportunity to serve their prospects in a professional and thorough manner.

“Just two years ago we saw the average debt load range of $10-15,000 move to $25-30,0000. This represents both the number of clients and the size of the debt.”

“I don’t think we understand the surmountable problem that is at hand! Because the countries debt problem has been slow and subtle over the decades we have failed to recognize the beast that has been growing, and if not tamed can literally do some serious damage to our country and its future. No matter what, we will continue to service, educate, and care about the individual families that are wrestling with this beast”.

Jeff Boulton is the President of RiseAbove Debt Relief, a debt-settlement company based out of Phoenix, Arizona. Jeff has over seven years experience in the industry and can be reached at jeff@riseabovedebtrelief.com

Jeff started in the financial lending industry in 2000, worked with clients and their investment portfolio. During this time he held educational seminars on becoming debt free and investing and still does so. A year and a half ago started Rise Above Debt Relief www.riseabovedebtrelief.com , and now is aggressively helping people get out of debt.

DoublePositive Marketing Group is featured in Business.com’s “Guide to Buying Mortgage Leads.”

The article does a good job of educating mortgage and real estate lead buyers about what to look for in a good lead vendor. Some of the tips include:

• “Leads are good, live customers are better. Increasingly, mortgage lead companies are using call centers to call up leads for you, cutting down on the number of useless calls.”
• “Don’t confuse mortgage leads with mortgage lists. Lead are first-time buyers who are actively seeking a loan. Lists will be homeowners who might be looking to refinance, but have no serious time concerns pushing them to do so.”
• “Get pre-screen leads through companies like DoublePositive.” 

(We like and agree with the last one a lot :-)

Business.com is a leading B2B search engine, and it helps business decision makers find information through advertisements and editorial contnet.

For many lead buyers, leads serve a single and very important function: feed the sales funnel. But for a business owner or hiring manager, leads can also provide a great way to recruit good talent to your organization.

Ask yourself this… Why should someone come to work for your company? Sure, you offer potential employee a great work atmosphere, benefits, opportunity for advancement, etc… But when you’re specifically recruiting sales folks, the leads you purchase serve as a powerful recruiting tool.

Case in point — I recently received a LinkedIn message from a company looking to hire for sales associates. The message read:

What Do We Provide?

We provide real-time leads from the nation’s top lead generators, unsurpassed technology, world class marketing support and a lively work environment that won’t have you reaching for the snooze bar in the morning.

Salary plus an aggressive commission, bonus and benefit package, strong income potential, a team of highly qualified processors to help you focus on what you do best: SELLING!

That guy gets it. Yeah, he talks about the obligatory job posting stuff — salary, commission, bonus, benefits, blah… blah… blah. But at the top of things that this company has to offer to its sales people is a commitment to purchasing the best leads and providing world class marketing support. Very cool.

The Fed finally came to the table, well, not with anything concrete, but with thoughts on what they’re going to do in response to the current credit crunch. Sounds about right – make yourself visible to the public as if the problem is at the forefront of your agenda – and then do nothing. With an election in our midst, this seems right on track. Expect to see a lot of promises about the economy, liquidity, and how regulation will be set in to place so another “sub-prime fallout” will never happen again. And then, get ready to complain when nothing happens.

From what I read there were two main themes, the first being how government will help struggling homeowners. Here is what Bush said:

“I plan to help homeowners, the government’s got a role to play,” Bush said. “But it’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who made the decision to buy a home they couldn’t afford.”

I have to say, I agree with this, I think it’s pretty straight forward. I am curious though what role they’re going to play, I bet they’re curious too. I was fortunate enough though to get an advance copy of the government’s new ad campaign to support this statement and it’s intiative to prevent future melt-downs.

(I found this at blog).

So, to re-cap, the new initiative to help ignite the recovery of the mortgage market and the credit crunch is a two phase plan. Phase one of the plan is for government to help homeowners. Phase two is to urge lenders to, well, help homeowners. Problem solved, we can all go home.