Mortgage marketing is stuck in 2008.
Not because the tactics are old. We have webinars instead of lunch-and-learns, sponsored posts instead of postcards. The problem isn’t outdated tools. It’s the mindset, the fact that most of us never really learned how to market in the first place.
That’s not an indictment of the people doing the work. It’s an indictment of the systems they inherited.
It’s Thursday afternoon in 2025. You’re setting up a booth at a Realtor appreciation event, maybe your third one this year. You paid $2,500 for the table. Dozens of agents drift by. Three stop. One takes a koozie without even looking up.
By six o’clock you’re loading candy and koozies back into your car and calling it 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 business. When business comes to you, marketing never has to evolve.
When the market shifted, the industry didn’t reinvent. It got quieter doing the same things. The loudest voices drew scrutiny; the flashiest lenders collapsed. So the industry built systems that kept everyone safe: layers of approval, compliance reviews, and messaging so neutral it said nothing at all. Those systems are still running seventeen years later, even though the reasons we built them are gone.
Today, lenders still fund the same activities: Realtor lunches, co-branded postcards, appreciation events. Not because they work, but because that’s what mortgage marketing has always looked like.
Ask ten loan officers what marketing means and you’ll probably get the same answer: “I just need more leads.”
That isn’t a strategy. It’s desperation dressed up as demand.
Scroll any lender’s social feed and you’ll see the pattern. A closing photo with keys on a counter. A quote about “homeownership dreams.” “Proud to help another family close.” Then in November, “Grateful for my partners.”
Everyone’s trying to be seen. No one’s actually being discovered.
More than half of Millennial and Gen Z buyers say they’re overloaded by financial information, and just as many have delayed major decisions because of complexity. That’s not just an affordability crisis; it’s a clarity crisis. And while that’s happening, lenders still spend most of their budgets on Realtor-focused tactics that worked when the phone rang on its own.
The cost isn’t just philosophical. When borrowers find answers from creators instead of lenders, your cost-per-lead doubles. You’re paying for visibility you could have earned organically if you’d ever learned how.
Borrowers want someone who knows what it feels like to stare at a listing at midnight and think, Can I really afford this?
They want answers that sound human, not branded.
But the industry keeps showing up with “market updates” that nobody opens, because we never learned what people actually open.
Meanwhile, someone with a ring light is explaining DTI ratios in 90 seconds and building more trust than most lenders earn in a year. Among Gen Z, 71% use TikTok for homebuying research and 41% say they trust influencers for advice, according to FirstHome IQ. Real estate creators with a few thousand followers now out-engage national lenders, not because they’re better marketers, but because they actually market.
This isn’t a courage problem.
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 instead of pretty.
It creates demand instead of waiting for referrals.
And it sounds like someone you’d reply to, not a committee trying not to offend anyone.
The loan officers winning right now aren’t braver.
They just learned what the rest of the industry never had to: how to show up where decisions actually get made.
Because what most lenders call marketing isn’t marketing.
It’s the appearance of marketing, the activity we do when no one taught us the difference between being busy and being believed.
The 2008 playbook got you here because you didn’t need a real one. Now you do. And the good news is, the ones who learn fast enough will own the next decade.
Think your marketing playbook hasn’t caught up to the market? You’re probably right.
Over the next few 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 rethink compliance, recruiting, and content creation for 2025 and beyond.
Next up: why most loan officers are invisible (and how the best ones aren’t).
Follow the series. I’ll show you what’s working, what’s failing, and how to finally break out of the “safe but invisible” trap.
It’s time to move past 2008.
Bri Lees is the Head of Marketing at NEO Home Loans.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].