Your database has 350 past borrowers in it, and you call maybe 20 of them a year.
The other 330 closed, got a thank-you card, and fell into a black hole. When one of them refinances or buys their next house, you find out from the credit pull, if you find out at all. The fix is not “stay in touch more.” That is a resolution, not a system. The fix is an annual mortgage review tied to each borrower’s loan anniversary, so the work spreads evenly across all twelve months instead of piling into a January you will never get to.
Here is the build.
The trigger logic. The anchor date is the funding date of the original loan, not a calendar quarter and not the contact-created date. You want the review to land on the one-year mark of the loan closing, and every year after. In your CRM, that means a recurring annual trigger keyed to a custom date field. Set it to fire the task 14 days before the anniversary, so the outreach lands in the window where a borrower is naturally thinking about the house, not on the exact day, which feels robotic.
Because closings are spread across the year, the reviews spread too. If you funded 30 loans in March, those 30 reviews surface the following March, a couple a day, not all at once. A database of 350 contacts becomes roughly 30 reviews a month, about one or two a day. That is a workload one LO can actually sustain, which is the whole point. A review system you cannot keep up with is worse than none, because it sets an expectation you break.
The sequence around the call. The phone call is the center, but it sits inside a light touch sequence so you are not cold-dialing.
- Day minus 14: automated email. Subject: “your [Month] mortgage check-in.” Short, names the anniversary, says you will call this week, gives them the option to reply with a time.
- Day minus 7: if no reply, a text. “Hi [First], it’s [LO] at [Company]. It’s been about a year since we closed your loan, time for your annual review. Got 10 minutes this week?” Texting a past borrower for a service check-in is communication, not marketing, so it stays clean.
- Day 0: the call. Logged in the CRM with the script below.
- Day plus 1: recap email with anything you promised (a rate to watch, a HELOC number, a referral intro).
What the review actually covers. Five things, in order, because the order matters. Start with their goals, not your products.
1. The house and the family. Are they staying put, outgrowing it, thinking about a second property? This is where you learn about the next purchase before they start shopping for a lender. 2. The current loan health. What rate they are at, what they are paying, whether their situation changed (income, credit, other debt). You are listening for a gap between where they are and where the market is. 3. Equity and the HELOC question. A year of payments plus appreciation means they have more equity than they think. Name it. “You are probably sitting on meaningfully more equity than at closing. Are there projects or debts where that could help?” This is the single most under-asked question in a purchase-dominant market where straight rate-and-term refis are thin. 4. The rate watch. If a refinance does not pencil today, set the trigger. Tell them the exact rate at which it would make sense for them, and that you will watch it. Then actually set that alert in your CRM. 5. The referral ask, earned not bolted on. You just spent ten minutes on their financial life. Now the ask lands.
The script. Tighten it to your own voice, but the bones:
“Hey [First], it’s [LO] over at [Company]. Reason I’m calling, it’s been about a year since we got your loan closed, and I do a quick annual review with everyone I’ve worked with. Couple minutes, no pitch. How’s the house treating you? … Good. Quick gut check, has anything changed on your end since we closed, income, any big purchases, anything on the credit side? … Got it. So here’s what I’m seeing. You closed at [rate] last year. A year in, two things usually worth a look. One, with a year of payments plus what’s happened to values around you, you’re likely sitting on more equity than you’d guess, which matters if you’ve got a project or some higher-rate debt you’d want to fold in. Two, on a straight refinance, today it [does or doesn’t] make sense, and if it doesn’t yet, I’ll tell you the exact number where it would and keep an eye on it for you. … Last thing, and the reason I do these calls. The clients I work with usually know one or two people, a coworker buying their first place, family thinking about a move, who’d rather work with someone a friend already trusts than a name off a Google ad. Anyone come to mind I should take good care of?”
That last line works because about 76% of borrowers pick their lender on their agent’s or someone they trust’s recommendation. You are not begging for a referral. You are giving a satisfied borrower an easy way to make a referral they were already inclined to make.
Why this beats “just stay in touch.” A drip newsletter reaches everyone and moves no one. The annual review reaches each borrower once, at a moment that makes sense, with a real conversation that surfaces the three things that turn a closed loan into the next loan: a refinance when rates move, a HELOC sitting in their equity, and a referral they were happy to give. Worked consistently across a database, recapturing past borrowers is worth roughly six to twelve extra loans a year that you would otherwise lose to whoever called them first.
BNTouch Mortgage CRM is built to run exactly this. Anniversary-based triggers off the funding date, the automated email and text touches around the call, the logged call script, and the rate-watch alert all live in one independent, all-in-one system, so the review fires whether or not you remember it that morning. It will also alert you in real time when a past borrower’s credit gets pulled by another lender, which is the same database, defended from the other side: the ones you did not get to yet, flagged the moment they start shopping.
If you want to see the anniversary triggers and the review sequence set up on real screens, book a quick demo and we will build one month of reviews together on the call. request a demo
