In the reverse mortgage market, profitability is down right now, and that makes spending money on marketing especially tough.
All Reverse Mortgage has found a creative solution to promoting its services online without breaking the bank.
It’s called the All Reverse Loan Optimizer, or ARLO, and it seeks to answer all your reverse-related questions. Last month, ARLO hit a milestone, answering its 1,000th public question.
The California-based lender has been answering questions from borrowers online for a decade, elevating its digital presence (and its Google searchability) with each slice information it sets free on the web.
“We were constantly being asked questions and people are hungry for knowledge,” All Reverse President Cliff Auerswald said. “We knew we needed a better way to get them the information quicker, so they could run their own loan scenarios without having to give a pint of blood.”
To provide an accurate and thorough response, the All Reverse team calls upon the help of multiple direct endorsement underwriters and its contacts at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, asking them to weigh in on the tough questions.
Unsurprisingly, Auerswald said the most common questions ARLO gets relates to heirs and loan maturity.
“We have spent over 10 years answering questions for people and during that time, if we didn’t have an answer immediately at hand, we found it for them,” Auerswald said. “Sometimes that meant calling on other industry professionals, searching through HUD manuals, or even being honest with folks and letting them know that there was no way we could give them an answer instead of making something up.”
Now, an archive of ARLO’s answers exists that serves as an online encyclopedia that regularly draws visitors to the lender’s website.
Auerswald said wading through consumer submissions can be trying at times.
“It’s a labor of love, because sometimes the questions are more difficult than others, sometimes they are more combative and sometimes more repetitive,” he said. “But they are always thought provoking.”
Auerswald said ARLO embodies All Reverse’s philosophy of educating borrowers rather than selling to them.
“If you educate a borrower and they want or need the product after they know what it will or won’t do, then great,” he said. “But if not, we would rather not do the loan for the right reason than do it for the wrong reason.”
