How to Manage Your Mortgage Pipeline in HighLevel

Your pipeline is your business at a glance. Every deal, every stage, every dollar. If you can't look at your pipeline and immediately know where you stand this month, something is broken.

Most loan officers "manage" their pipeline in their head, in a spreadsheet, or in whatever their LOS provides. The problem: none of those options connect to your marketing, your follow-up automation, or your team's visibility. HighLevel fixes that by making your pipeline the central nervous system of your entire mortgage operation.

Setting Up Your Mortgage Pipeline

Go to Opportunities > Pipelines in HighLevel. You'll want at least two pipelines, possibly three.

Pipeline 1: Purchase Loans

This is your primary pipeline. Here are the stages we recommend:

1. New Lead - Contact just came in, no outreach yet
2. Contacted - You've made first contact
3. Qualifying - Active conversation, assessing their situation
4. Pre-Approved - Officially pre-approved and shopping
5. Under Contract - Offer accepted, purchase agreement signed
6. Processing - File submitted to processing
7. Underwriting - In underwriting review
8. Clear to Close - Approved, scheduling closing
9. Funded - Closed and funded (won)
10. Lost - Deal fell through (lost)

Pipeline 2: Refinance Loans

Similar structure but with refi-specific stages:

1. New Lead
2. Contacted
3. Analyzing - Running the numbers, comparing scenarios
4. Application Submitted
5. Processing
6. Underwriting
7. Clear to Close
8. Funded
9. Lost / No Benefit

Pipeline 3 (Optional): Realtor Partners

Track your referral relationships separately:

1. Identified - Agent on your target list
2. Initial Outreach - First contact made
3. Meeting Scheduled - Coffee, lunch, or call booked
4. Active Relationship - Regular communication established
5. Referring - They've sent you at least one deal
6. Top Partner - Consistent referral source

Opportunity Fields That Matter

Each opportunity (deal) in your pipeline has fields you should be filling out. The default fields include name, value, and status. But the power comes from connecting custom fields to your opportunities.

Automating Pipeline Movement

Here's where HighLevel's pipeline becomes more than a visual board. When you connect workflows to pipeline stage changes, every move triggers the right action automatically.

Stage-Based Automations

• New Lead → Contacted: Trigger speed-to-lead workflow, send internal notification
• Contacted → Pre-Approved: Send congratulations email with next steps checklist
• Under Contract → Processing: Send borrower a "what to expect in processing" email, notify processor
• Clear to Close → Funded: Trigger post-close sequence (review request, referral ask, anniversary tagging)
• Any Stage → Lost: Tag as lost, add to re-engagement campaign, log the reason

The magic is that your team doesn't need to remember to send these messages. They just drag a card from one stage to the next, and the system handles the rest.

Automatic Pipeline Entry

Don't make your team manually create opportunities. Use workflows to auto-create them:

• New lead from a funnel form? Auto-create opportunity in "New Lead" stage.
• Contact tagged "purchase-lead"? Auto-create in Purchase pipeline.
• Lead from Zillow or LendingTree? Auto-create and tag with the source.

Pipeline Management Best Practices

Review Your Pipeline Daily

Spend 10 minutes every morning looking at your pipeline. Which deals haven't moved in a week? Which ones need a follow-up today? The visual Kanban view makes this fast. If a card is sitting in "Contacted" for two weeks, something is wrong.

Set Opportunity Values Correctly

Don't leave the value at $0. Enter your expected commission (or at least loan amount) for every deal. When you can glance at your pipeline and see "$47,000 in Underwriting" and "$23,000 in Processing," you have real financial visibility.

Use the "Lost" Stage Intentionally

When a deal dies, move it to Lost and add a note about why. Did the borrower go with another lender? Did they stop responding? Did they not qualify? This data is invaluable for improving your process. After a few months, you'll see patterns: maybe 30% of your lost deals went with a competitor because of rate, telling you something about your pricing strategy.

Don't Let Deals Stagnate

Set up a workflow that flags stale opportunities. If a deal hasn't moved stages in 14 days, send yourself an alert. Stale deals mean missed follow-ups, and missed follow-ups mean lost revenue.

Pipeline for Teams

If you manage a team of loan officers, the pipeline becomes your management dashboard.

• Assign every opportunity to an LO. Use HighLevel's user assignment feature. Filter the pipeline by assigned user to see each LO's deals.
• Track conversion by stage. How many leads does each LO move from "Contacted" to "Pre-Approved"? That's your conversion metric.
• Weekly pipeline reviews. Pull up the pipeline in your team meeting. Walk through stuck deals, upcoming closings, and leads that need attention.
• Round-robin lead distribution. Use workflows to automatically assign new leads to LOs in rotation. No more cherry-picking or uneven distribution.

Connecting Pipeline to Your LOS

Your pipeline in HighLevel won't replace your LOS. Encompass, Byte, or whatever you use is still the system of record for the actual loan file. But your HighLevel pipeline is your marketing and sales system of record.

The best setup: use your HighLevel pipeline for lead management through pre-approval, then use your LOS from application forward. If you want to keep both in sync, Zapier can update HighLevel pipeline stages when milestones are hit in your LOS (and vice versa).

For teams using Broker Toolkit, the integration is tighter. LOS milestones can automatically update HighLevel pipeline stages, giving you a single view of every deal from lead to funded without manual updates.

Your Pipeline Template

The HL4 Pro Snapshot Library includes pre-built mortgage pipelines with the stage structures outlined above, plus the automation workflows that connect to each stage change. Import the snapshot and your pipeline is ready to use in minutes, not hours.