Mortgage influencers brace for the TikTok ban

Originators who capitalized on the social media platform hope for a last-second reprieve

Mortgage influencers brace for the TikTok ban

Originators who capitalized on the social media platform hope for a last-second reprieve
TikTok
Rebecca Richardson stands before the camera while recording a TikTok video. The North Carolina-based originator gained more than 147,000 followers on the social media platform.

Rebecca Richardson, also known as “The Mortgage Mentor” on TikTok, gave a tearful goodbye this week to her 147,000 followers on the platform.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based originator is among several mortgage influencers lamenting TikTok’s imminent demise.

“It absolutely brought me business,” Richardson told Scotsman Guide this week.

The app is scheduled to disappear on Sunday to comply with a federal law that orders TikTok to separate from its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance.

Richardson says she’s posted videos on TikTok since 2019 and likens the space to “an art teacher’s room.”  Her recent post gives advice on the advantages of buying a home from a relative to an update on a Department of Justice lawsuit against major rental owners.

Other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, have a different “vibe” that don’t suit her informal style as well as TikTok, she said.

“It gave me a place to be creative within this industry, which tends to be very left brain,” Richardson said, adding she likes the instant feedback from followers.

“I got to really understand what people cared about versus what maybe I thought that they needed to know,” she said.

TikTok has proven to be an excellent, and free, way for small business owners to market themselves, including mortgage originators facing a downturn in business in recent years. 

Mandy Phillips, known as “mortgagemandy” on TikTok to her 140,000 followers, said she started posting in early 2022.

Phillips, who is based in Redding, California, said three months after posting her first video she closed on a million-dollar loan from a San Francisco borrower who found her on TikTok.

The next year, in 2023, while interest rates were shooting up and business plummeted in her area, Phillips said she was able to expand into five states, and three quarters of her business came from TikTok followers.

“It’s been a really integral part of my business,” Phillips said. “Local Realtors and other local potential homebuyers have found me that way as well. So, it’s been helpful both nationally and locally.” 

Phillips said she has been building a following on Instagram and Facebook but is still holding out hope that TikTok will get a last-minute reprieve, though she admits she’s losing hope.

“If this were a couple of weeks ago, I would’ve still very much been in denial and said there’s no way that this is going to go away, but it sounds like it’s getting pretty serious,” Phillips said.  â€śI’m hopeful that there’s going to be, at minimum, some delay.”

The Supreme Court is mulling a challenge brought by TikTok and a group of its users that argue the ban violates the First Amendment.

President-elect Donald Trump also has indicated he was mulling an executive order in a bid to delay the ban, the Washington Post reported.

Richardson said she is resigned to the fact that the platform may end. She told her followers that this could be her last week, thanking them for making her “a better person.”

In the meantime, she is attempting to increase her following on Instagram.

“The bigger lesson here is that loan officers have to be diversified because we don’t own these platforms and we don’t own those followers,” Richardson said. 

Author

  • Victor Whitman

    Victor Whitman is a contributing writer for Scotsman Guide and a former editor of the publication’s commercial magazine. 

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