Full Transcript is Below:
– Welcome in to NFM TV, I’m your host, Greg Sher. You know the magazine well, you know the name. If you’re in the mortgage business, you are very familiar with Scotsman Guide. And joining us right now is the Executive Director/Principal of the magazine, Todd Britton-Simmons from Seattle, Washington from his corporate headquarters. Todd, thank you so much for being on NFM TV.
– Absolutely, thanks for having me, Greg.
– It’s a pleasure, you’ve got a lot to celebrate these days. January 2020, it marks 26 years that you’ve been publishing the magazine. It also marks a rebrand on your website. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve done online and how the user experience is changing.
– Sure, the user experience is significantly improved. It’s not only even more mobile friendly, but you’re able to quickly find lenders that will do the deal you have in hand. We’ve expanded the online search engines to include over 1600 different data points. We have the three different databases for purchase, refinance, and seconds for the lender searches. And that includes all of your commercial, your multi-family, your hard money, your construction. Or your non-QM, we have your FHA prime in there as well. And also the job opportunities. We’ve expanded those as well. Previously we’ve been pretty much focused on branch managers but we’ve expanded to include other sales jobs, originator sales jobs, so we include like your retail loan officer, your wholesale AE, your commercial and hard money sales reps and correspondent.
– And so, what’s the balancing act like between attracting an audience looking to find a new lender to work for and the audience that is just looking to answer product questions and see who does what?
– Yeah, we have a lot of traffic from both. I mean we, from the online searches, like so far this month we’ve done over 10,000 and roughly about 15% of that are looking for job opportunities. And then the rest are looking for, searching for lenders.
– That’s still a big number, that’s 1500 people out there in a month just on the web traffic alone, you’re not even talking about the people that peel this magazine open that are looking for jobs. So if you’re a lender, that’s a big deal. And I can speak for ourselves here at NFM that one of the best and brightest branches that we have at NFM actually answered an ad that we put in the back of The Scotsman’s Guide, so, I wanna give you full credit for that. And along that same vein, so you’ve got your top originator edition, which is open right now for submittals. This is a big deal. It comes out in the April edition, but the window’s open now for people to send in their numbers. Let’s talk all about the top originator edition, starting with what the submittal process is like and what people should be doing to get their numbers in.
– You just need to go on to ScotsmanGuide.com and look for the Ranking tab and then it’ll, from there, you’ll be able to access the submission form. And just each individual needs to come in and submit their 2019 production and/or we do have the option from, if you wanted to do it for a company wide to come in and submit a bulk submission. So we do have that for those that are submitting like 10 or more originators, we’ll send out a bulk submission form.
– And something really exciting, you have broken down the production to have a single category for women producers. That’s awesome, we’ve got some incredible female producers at NFM Lending, we always like to put them where they belong on a pedestal. Tell us about that, what went into that thought process?
– Yeah, no, absolutely. It was, definitely is a segment of the industry that’s a little, doesn’t get the recognition to their contributions and achievements within the industry. So we just wanted to break it out and we just kind of gave it a shot this last year and we were able to produce a really nice list. The May edition is when we published the top women originators. We’re super proud, this will be our second year doing it. And again, with the online search engines, I’ll be able to do some expanded, search engines are a expanded rankings for those too.
– Is that a separate submittal? In other words if your company is submitting all of the data, will you extract that or do they need to go to a separate tab and upload?
– No, no, that submission period is the same as the top originators. So that’ll just be one of the fields is gender.
– Understood. I’ve gotta ask you about the size of the magazine, because this is one of the things that really stands out as a trademark for you guys. I mean, it’s a long magazine. Anyone that’s seen it, knows it. It’s so quickly recognizable. I’m guessing that’s intentional. Tell us the thought behind it.
– Yeah, absolutely. The tabloid size was really kind of created, not only for a branding purpose, but also to make us stand out. But to accommodate the matrix listings. So the lender listings and the job opportunities. They need to have like 32, 34, different data points, at least online, to be beneficial. So we weren’t able to reduce it any further than that.
– Well I can tell ya, it really stands out. You can see it on any coffee table in any mortgage company. So, if my vote matters, which I know it doesn’t, keep the size, keep it this long, because it really does help things stand out. All right, so, you’ve rebranded your website, you’re now in your 26th year, you’ve got so many exciting things happening, including as we’ve just spoken about, the top originator edition which you’re taking submissions for right now. Give us a shout out for your organization, if people want more information, if they wanna subscribe, if they wanna upload their numbers, where should people go, what should they do?
– [Todd] Absolutely. Just come on over to scotsmanguide.com and you can either subscribe to the print magazine or our digital edition. We also have apps you can download that are available on your Google, Amazon, and Apple for our digital edition. So that’s a great way just to kind of carry it around with you if you wanna read us offline. And then, for the submission period, you just need to jump on our website, it’s really easy to access by way of the rankings tab on there. And just go in, submit your numbers, and we’ll, typically for the rankings themselves, our cutoffs are gonna be roughly 40 million and 100 loans to make the online rankings.
– Todd Britton-Simmons, this has been awesome. We did it, I really appreciate your time and for you joining us and for all you do for the mortgage industry to keep it real and keep it relevant. So thank you so much for your time.
– Thanks Greg, thanks for having me.
– All right we look forward to reading you for 2020 and maybe we’ll sit back down again next December. Thank you so much, I’m Greg Sher from NFM TV. We will see you again soon.