Mortgage marketing is stuck in 2008.
Not because the tactic is old. We have webinars instead of lunch-and-learns, sponsored posts instead of postcards. The problem isn’t outdated tools. It’s the mentality, the fact that most of us never really learned how to market in the first place.
That’s not an indictment of the people who do the work. It is an indictment of the systems they inherited.
It’s Thursday afternoon in 2025. You’re setting up a booth at a Realtor appreciation event, perhaps your third this year. You paid $2,500 for the table. Dozens of police officers pass by. Three stops. You take a koozie without even looking up.
Around six o’clock you load candy and koozies back into your car and make a call brand awareness. You’ll do it again next quarter.
That’s not an outlier, it’s just how the industry still operates, quietly and routinely.
For years after the crash, referrals carried the company. When business comes to you, marketing never has to evolve.
When the market changed, the industry did not reinvent. It became quieter to do the same things. The loudest voices attracted attention; the most notable lenders went bankrupt. So the industry built systems that kept everyone safe: layers of approvals, compliance reviews, and messaging so neutral that there was no say at all. Those systems are still running seventeen years later, even though the reasons we built them are gone.
Today, lenders still finance the same activities: broker lunches, co-branded postcards, appreciation events. Not because they work, but because mortgage marketing has always looked like this.
Ask ten loan officers what marketing means and you’ll probably get the same answer: “I just need more leads.”
That’s not a strategy. It’s desperation dressed up as a question.
Scroll through any lender’s social feed and you’ll see the pattern. A lock photo with keys on a counter. A quote about ‘dreaming about your own house’. “Proud to be able to help bring closure to another family.” Then in November: ‘Grateful for my partners.’
Everyone is trying to be seen. No one is actually discovered.
More than half of Millennial and Gen Z buyers say they are overloaded with financial information, and just as many have put off big decisions because of the complexity. That’s not just an affordability crisis; it is a crisis of clarity. And while that’s happening, lenders are still spending most of their budgets on broker-centric tactics that worked when the phone rang by itself.
The costs are not just philosophical. When borrowers find answers from makers instead of lenders, your cost per lead doubles. You’re paying for the visibility you could have earned organically if you’d ever learned how.
Lenders want someone who knows what it feels like to stare at an ad at midnight and think: Can I really afford this?
They want answers that sound human, not branded.
But the industry keeps coming up with “market updates” that no one opens because we never learned what people actually open.
Meanwhile, someone with a ring light explains DTI ratios in 90 seconds and builds more trust than most lenders earn in a year. Among Gen Z, 71% use TikTok to research home purchases and 41% say they trust influencers for advice, according to FirstHome IQ. Real estate developers with a few thousand followers now outpace national lenders, not because they are better marketers, but because they are actually in the market.
This is not a courage issue.
It’s a competency problem, the result of doing what worked just well enough to survive.
Real marketing in 2025 answers real questions.
It builds trust by being useful rather than pretty.
It creates demand instead of waiting for referrals.
And it sounds like someone you would respond to, not a committee trying to offend no one.
The loan officers who are winning now are no braver.
They just learned what the rest of the industry never had to do: how to show up where decisions are actually made.
Because what most lenders call marketing is not marketing.
It’s the appearance of marketing, the activity we do when no one has taught us the difference between being busy and being believed.
The 2008 script got you here because you didn’t need a real book. Now you do. And the good news is: those who learn fast enough will rule the next decade.
Do you think your marketing playbook hasn’t caught up with the market yet? You’re probably right.
Over the coming months, this series will break down what modern mortgage marketing actually looks like. We’ll look at how to build demand engines that work, how to measure real influence, and how to reimagine compliance, recruitment, and content creation for 2025 and beyond.
Next question: why most loan officers are invisible (and why the best ones aren’t).
Follow the series. I’ll show you what works, what doesn’t and how you can finally escape the ‘safe but invisible’ trap.
It’s time to move beyond 2008.
Bri Lees is head of marketing at NEO Home Loans.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial staff and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].
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