Raising Their Site
David Dickstein bought out National Pacific Mortgage Corp.’s Woodland Hills office last year and started business with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Dickstein knew his firm needed a presence on the Internet, but the Web site he established brought little response. After months of surfing the Net, Dickstein revamped https://www.pacpartners.com and has reaped results.
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I set up a Web site because I knew that our business needed to get involved in the Internet, but it brought only sporadic inquiries. Meanwhile, I started learning from what I saw on highly successful sites.
I realized that good sites are designed like an electronic magazine, where you can flip to an index, find the things that interest you and take action.
Our customers are shopping for a loan, and they do not want to have to scroll through a lot of text. Our first site had way too much text and scrolling.
It’s tempting when you first set up a site to make it an ego trip. We put all kinds of great background information in there that we thought people would be interested in.
But we did not understand our audience. We found that Internet loan-seekers typically earn $64,000 to $75,000, are between 25 and 34, tend to be very independent and serious, and hate glitz, gimmicks and pushy salespeople.
When we redesigned the site, I contacted a longtime friend of mine who develops Web sites. He made the site more quick-loading and more clickable without sacrificing attractive graphics. If the users want to read about our background, they can click on that.
We developed content that is valuable to the first-time home buyer, including information about crime rates, education and employment in various Southern California communities. We put up links to sites sponsored by agencies like HUD, the Mortgage Bankers Assn. and local real estate brokers.
A grid of preset graphics appears on the left-hand side of every page. The user can fill out a short loan pre-approval form right online and submit it instantly, then we respond within 24 hours.
How often can a borrower fill out a loan application in his shorts at 2 in the morning, send it in and get loan pre-approval the next day? Most of our customers have young children and do not want to shuffle all over town.
The instructions and the descriptions are simple, not fancy. Cute animation is fun, but it doesn’t get our customers any closer to getting a loan.
Since we put up the new site, we have been getting three to five requests for loan pre-approvals every day. That’s converting to about one new loan a week. For us, four or five extra loans a month is absolute gold. And when they come from the Web site, we do not have to pay a sales commission on them.
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PACIFIC PARTNERS
* Owners: David and Harriet Dickstein; Dan and Lori Bonfiglio
* Nature of business: Mortgage bankers
* Location: Warner Center, 5950 Canoga Ave., Suite 605, Woodland Hills
* Year founded: 1996
* Employees: 10
* Annual revenue: $600,000
