Financing can help more homeowners move forward with a home improvement project, but one lender won't be the right fit for every customer.
Working with multiple lenders gives you more options across different credit profiles, loan programs, and project needs. You can manage those lender relationships directly, or use a multi-lender platform to bring them into one financing process.
Multi-lender platforms are still relatively new in home improvement. It's worth understanding what they actually do, how they differ from managing multiple lenders yourself, and what to look for when choosing one.
Every lender has its own credit criteria and financing programs. A homeowner can qualify with one lender and get declined by another.
That means relying on one lender can limit the financing options available to your customers. If the lender declines an application or doesn't have a program that works for the homeowner, your rep has nowhere else to go.
This becomes more noticeable as your business grows. Once you're doing around $5 million or more in annual revenue, you're typically bringing enough homeowners through the door that you'll see a much wider range of credit profiles. One lender is unlikely to cover all of them.
Working with multiple lenders can also give you more negotiating power. With one lender, your financing program depends on that lender's criteria, programs, and pricing. With several lender relationships, you have more room to decide where you send your financing volume and discuss the programs and pricing that work for your business.
Adding lenders gives your team more ways to find an option that works and more control over your financing strategy. The next decision is how you're going to manage those lenders.
You don't need a multi-lender platform to work with multiple lenders. You can build relationships with several lenders and have your team manage each one directly.
The difference is how your sales team accesses those lenders and how much of the financing process they have to manage themselves.
When you work directly with lenders, your reps typically access each lender through its own portal.
Say a homeowner applies with your first lender and gets declined. Your rep now has to decide which lender to try next, move into that lender's process, and continue the application from there.
That puts a lot of the lender strategy in the rep's hands. One salesperson may know your lender mix well, while another defaults to the lender they're most comfortable using. As you add more reps, keeping that process consistent becomes harder.
A multi-lender platform brings your lenders into one financing process.
Instead of asking reps to move between lender portals and decide where each application should go, the platform can manage more of that process for them. Depending on the platform, one application can be used across multiple lenders, and the system can help determine which lender is the right fit for the homeowner.
Your reps still have access to multiple financing options, but they have one process to learn and follow.
That's an important distinction when comparing multi-lender platforms. Having multiple lenders in one place is useful. How the platform manages those lenders for your sales team is what you should look at next.
A multi-lender platform should make it easier for your sales team to use the lender options you've put in place. The best way to evaluate one is to look at what changes during a real financing conversation.
Giving reps access to multiple lenders still leaves one big decision: which lender should get the application?
If your reps have to make that call, they need to understand the criteria behind every lender you offer. In practice, they may default to the lender they know best or the program they're most comfortable presenting.
Some multi-lender platforms handle that decision for them. They use information from the application to determine which lender is most likely to be a fit, then route the application accordingly.
One Click Contractor takes this approach. Its LenderStax™ technology matches the homeowner with the lender most likely to fund the project at terms they're likely to accept.
The value of multiple lenders drops quickly if the homeowner has to start over every time you try another one.
Imagine your first lender declines the application. Your rep now has to explain what happened and ask the homeowner to complete another application. If that option doesn't work either, the process gets even harder to keep moving.
A multi-lender platform with a universal application can use the homeowner's information across its lender network.
With One Click Contractor, the rep completes one guided, soft-pull application in under four minutes. If another lender needs to be considered, the rep doesn't have to start a separate application from scratch.
A strong lender mix gives you somewhere else to go when the first lender isn't a fit.
This is where the lenders available through the platform matter. You want coverage across the credit profiles and projects your company actually sees, not simply a long list of lender logos.
The process after a decline matters too. If your rep still has to remember to try another lender and decide which one to use, applications can stop before you've exhausted the available options.
Look for a platform that keeps the application moving through the appropriate lender options without relying on the rep to manage every step.
Approval rate tells you how many applications your lenders approve. It doesn't tell you how many of those homeowners actually move forward.
That's where take rate comes in. Take rate measures how many approved loans are accepted by the homeowner and continue toward funding.
This is an important metric when evaluating a multi-lender platform because getting an approval is only part of the financing process. Your rep still needs to get the loan across the finish line.
One Click Contractor customers have seen an 11% higher take rate. The guided process shows reps what still needs to happen after approval, helping prevent approved applications from sitting unfinished.
Take rate can also help sales managers spot coaching opportunities. If a rep gets plenty of approvals but fewer homeowners move forward, you have a specific part of their financing conversation to look at.
Adding another lender shouldn't mean teaching every rep another way to offer financing.
With a multi-lender platform, your lender mix can change behind the process your reps already use. You can add an option or change where you send financing volume without rebuilding the financing workflow for the entire sales team.
That becomes particularly useful as you add reps. Instead of expecting every salesperson to become an expert on your lender strategy, you can build more of that strategy into the process they follow.
One Click Contractor brings multi-lender financing into the same process your reps use to estimate, present price, and close the job.
Your rep completes one guided, soft-pull application in under four minutes. LenderStax™ then matches the homeowner with the lender most likely to fund the project at terms they're likely to accept. If another lender needs to be considered, the application can continue through additional options without sending your rep into another lender portal or asking the homeowner to start over.
For growing home improvement companies, that gives you a financing process you can use across the sales team while keeping the lender strategy where it belongs: at the business level.
"Since we started using One Click Contractor, take rate is up 8–12%, credit declines are down, cancellations are down — all because we can do everything in the house in front of the customer." — Dave Capezza, K&P Remodeling
Want to see how it works? Book a demo with One Click Contractor.