It’s no secret that the use of social media has grown tremendously in recent years. This has triggered the development of numerous social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, eBay and many more. Consumers both young and old have flocked to use these platforms mainly to connect with people. Businesses are also taking part in this exploitation of social media.
As a mortgage lender, you should not be left behind. Social media is an information gold-mine you can use to screen potential borrowers and ultimately boost your business. In the mortgage lending business, you already know that the borrower’s creditworthiness as well as the identity is paramount. So, to aid you in critically analyzing your borrowers, this article provides you with information that will help you to use social media to screen borrowers.
You can use social media to confirm the information provided in the mortgage loan documents by the borrower. This includes the borrower’s job status, their salaries, their job history, etc. You can cross-check what they have stated on paper with what they have posted online. LinkedIn is the best for this because users post a lot of information about their job history, from which you can research the possible salaries.
If your borrower is a small business, you can use social media to check the ability of the business to pay back the loan. With many businesses having social media pages as well as selling their products online, you can check out what customers are saying about them. What are the reviews of the businesses and the products like? You can tell if a business is on the verge of collapse if many of the reviews about it are negative.
You can also use the connections the borrower has to determine if they are creditworthy. Most social media platforms insist that the users should connect with people they know personally. Therefore, if you check out the connections or friends of your borrower and find one that was a delinquent borrower with you, then chances that the borrower will be delinquent too are high.
Another method of using social media to screen borrowers is by checking their comments as well comments by other people about them. You will know if a person is loyal and credible if they have that one person or a group of people that he or she will always defend in conversations. Such people tend to have a high social-media-street-credibility. Therefore, the chances that they will pay back are high.
Now that you know how you can use social media to screen borrowers, it is also vital that you get to know the privacy terms and conditions for any of the platforms you want to use. It is universally forbidden to use hacker-software to check a person’s profile on social media. However, the public information available is usually enough to help you better understand who your borrower really is.
