Key Takeaways

• Attract strong brokers with a clear proposition covering earnings, lead flow, support, systems, development and genuine career progression—not commission split alone.
• Define the broker profile you need, model the economics of the hire, and recruit against broker-specific competencies rather than chemistry.
• Set clear expectations around lead generation, then use structured onboarding and ongoing scenario, pipeline and development sessions to build capability.
• Retain good brokers by balancing autonomy with consistent standards, measuring more than settlements, addressing blockers early and providing credible progression opportunities.

Most brokerage owners think about growth in terms of leads, referral partners and settlements. Fewer think about it in terms of people — specifically, why a capable broker would choose to build their career inside your business rather than somewhere else, or on their own. That’s a mistake, because the ceiling on most brokerages isn’t demand. It’s the number of good brokers willing to write loans under your banner.

A commission split alone has never been enough to attract or keep a strong broker, and it’s becoming even less sufficient as brokers weigh up leadership, mentoring, lead quality, technology, career progression and — for some — a path to equity. If your brokerage’s pitch to a prospective broker stops at “generous split, supportive team,” you’re competing on the one dimension that’s easiest for someone else to match.

This article works through how to think about recruiting and retaining brokers as a genuine commercial proposition — what to offer, how to evaluate who you’re hiring, how to onboard them properly, how to measure their performance beyond settlements, and how to keep your best people from deciding they’d rather build their own brokerage than yours.

Great Brokers Are Evaluating a Platform, Not Just a Job

When a capable broker considers joining — or staying with — a brokerage, they’re really asking whether the business helps them earn more, write more efficiently, develop their capability, build stronger relationships, and progress professionally, faster than they could manage on their own or elsewhere. Commission split is one input into that calculation, not the whole equation. This reframe matters because it changes what you’re actually building when you set out to recruit or retain brokers. You’re not writing a job ad. You’re designing a platform — a combination of earning potential, lead flow, support, professional development, technology and a genuine future — that makes a good broker demonstrably better off for having joined you. If you can’t articulate what that platform actually offers beyond the split, you’re relying on personal loyalty or inertia to keep people, and neither holds up well when a competitor or a broker’s own ambition comes calling.

Decide Which Broker You Actually Need

“A great broker” isn’t a single profile, and treating every hire the same way — same pitch, same onboarding, same expectations — tends to produce a mismatch somewhere. Different brokers are at different stages, and they need different things from your business.

The new-to-industry broker

This person needs structured mentoring, scenario support, clear processes and confidence-building more than they need autonomy or a large commission split. They’re evaluating whether you’ll actually teach them the job, not just hand them a lender panel and a login. If your business can’t commit real time to developing them in their first year, this may not be the right hire for you regardless of how promising they seem.

The established broker without a strong platform

This broker has deal flow and some runs on the board but is likely operating without much operational support, marketing, or systems. They’re attracted by a business that gives them better infrastructure than they currently have — processing support, a stronger referral network, better technology, or simply more time to focus on advice and business development instead of admin.

The high-performing broker

This person already has a strong book and a track record. Split matters here, but so does autonomy, lead quality, leadership opportunity, and increasingly, some kind of ownership or partnership pathway. This is also the broker most likely to be weighing up starting their own brokerage — so the proposition needs to make staying commercially and professionally more attractive than leaving.

Before recruiting, it’s worth writing a short candidate profile for the specific role you’re trying to fill — covering the capability level you need, whether they’ll be expected to self-generate business or work from centrally provided leads, how much autonomy they’ll have, and what role you genuinely see them growing into. Hiring against a clear profile, rather than “any good broker who’s available,” makes both the recruitment conversation and the eventual onboarding far more effective.

Build a Broker Value Proposition Before You Advertise the Role

Most brokerage owners can describe their commission structure in detail but struggle to articulate anything else a broker is actually joining for. A useful discipline is to write out your proposition across six specific areas before you post a role or start a conversation with a prospective hire.

• Earnings — the commission structure, any salary component, bonuses, trail arrangements, and how earning potential is expected to change over time.
• Lead opportunity — whether brokers are expected to self-generate business, receive centrally provided leads, or work a hybrid of both.
• Support — the processing, admin, credit, compliance and marketing support actually available day to day, not in theory.
• Capability — the mentoring, scenario support, lender education and coaching a broker will genuinely receive.
• Platform — your CRM, technology, brand recognition, aggregator relationship and lender panel access.
• Future — what a genuine senior role, leadership position, or ownership pathway could look like for someone who performs well.

The value of this exercise is in forcing specificity. A proposition like “the brokerage provides opportunities from established referral partnerships, but brokers are also expected to progressively build their own relationships over their first 18 months” tells a prospective broker far more, and is far more credible, than “unlimited earning potential.” If you can’t write a credible sentence for one of these six areas, that’s a genuine gap in your business — not just a gap in your pitch — and it’s worth addressing before you go looking for your next hire.

Check the Economics Before You Add Another Broker

It’s easy to assume that adding a producing broker is straightforwardly good for the business — more settlements, more trail, more capacity. The reality is that a new broker has a ramp-up period, during which they’re likely producing well below their eventual capacity while still consuming your time for mentoring, your team’s time for support, and potentially marketing or lead generation cost.

Before recruiting, it’s worth modelling the real cost of a broker seat: remuneration structure, support and processing cost, technology and marketing cost, the time you or a senior broker will spend mentoring them, and a realistic view of how long ramp-up will take before they’re a net positive contributor. There’s no reliable universal figure for how long that ramp-up period should take — it depends heavily on the broker’s experience, your business’s lead flow, and how much support you can genuinely provide — so this is better modelled against your own business’s history with previous hires than against an assumed industry number.

This isn’t about discouraging growth. It’s about making sure a hiring decision is made with a clear view of when it will actually pay off, rather than discovering six months in that the new broker’s ramp-up has quietly strained cash flow or pulled far more of your time than expected.

Recruit Against a Scorecard, Not Just Chemistry

A relaxed, likeable interview conversation tells you very little about whether someone will actually perform as a broker in your business. It’s worth assessing candidates against a defined set of competencies rather than a general impression of fit.

Useful categories to assess include credit and technical capability, client communication, sales and conversion ability, referral relationship capability, organisational and CRM discipline, coachability, compliance mindset, commercial judgement, and how they’re likely to work within a team rather than purely as an individual operator.

Generic interview questions rarely surface useful signal from an experienced broker. More revealing prompts include:

• “Talk me through how you handle a client whose preferred lender isn’t actually the most appropriate recommendation.”
• “Where did your last twenty client opportunities come from?”
• “How do you keep past clients and referral partners active in your pipeline?”
• “What does your CRM look like at the end of a typical working day?”
• “Tell me about a deal that went wrong. What did you change afterwards?”
• “What kind of support genuinely helps you perform, and what kind of management gets in your way?”

These questions expose how a broker actually operates — their pipeline discipline, their self-awareness about past mistakes, and their expectations of you as a manager — far more usefully than asking why they want to work in finance.

Be Explicit About Where Their Business Will Actually Come From

This is one of the most common sources of a broken relationship between a brokerage and a new broker, and it’s entirely avoidable with an honest conversation upfront. Ambiguity about lead flow creates mismatched expectations that surface a few months into the role, usually as frustration on both sides.

Broadly, three models exist. In a self-generated model, the broker owns most of the prospecting responsibility and the brokerage’s value is primarily in support, brand and systems. In a business-generated model, the broker receives centrally sourced leads and is expected to convert them well rather than build their own pipeline from scratch. In a hybrid model — the most common in practice — the broker receives some centrally generated opportunities while also being expected to develop their own referral relationships over time.

Whichever model applies, be specific with a new broker about how leads are allocated, who owns the relationship with repeat clients, what referral sources exist and how they’re shared, and what marketing or database support they can expect to use. A broker who was told they’d “get leads” and then receives an inconsistent trickle will not stay long, and a broker who assumed they’d be self-sourcing but expected more central support will feel unsupported. Neither outcome is a broker problem — it’s a communication gap that a clear conversation at the outset avoids.

Give New Brokers a Structured Runway, Not Just a Login

Handing a new broker a CRM login and a lender panel on day one, then expecting them to find their feet, wastes the investment you’ve just made in recruiting them. A structured first ninety days gives a new broker — whether new to industry or new to your business — a genuine chance to become productive rather than being left to work it out under pressure.

A practical structure looks like this:

• Days 1–30: systems and CRM training, understanding your credit and lender approach, compliance standards, and shadowing experienced brokers or team members on real client interactions.
• Days 31–60: supervised client work, regular scenario discussions with a mentor, beginning business development activity, and gradually taking ownership of parts of the file workflow.
• Days 61–90: a shift toward more independent operating expectations, a first proper KPI review, active pipeline building, and an agreed development plan for the following quarter.

The exact supervision and accreditation requirements during onboarding — particularly for anyone operating as a credit representative under your Australian Credit Licence — should be confirmed with your ACL holder or compliance team, since these vary by licensing structure and aggregator arrangement.

Build Capability Into the Weekly Rhythm, Not Just Onboarding

As the brokerage grows, developing individual brokers is only part of the challenge — the systems, expectations and leadership around them also need to support consistent team performance. Broker Coach’s guide to building a high-performing brokerage team is a useful next step for owners looking to turn capable individuals into a team that can work effectively together as the business scales.

Development doesn’t stop after the first ninety days, and treating training as a one-off onboarding event rather than an ongoing rhythm is a common reason capable brokers plateau or become frustrated with a lack of growth. A regular operating rhythm that includes development, not just performance review, tends to keep brokers improving and engaged.

A workable rhythm might include a weekly pipeline review, a regular scenario or lender policy discussion where the team works through complex or unusual deals together, a one-to-one development conversation separate from pure performance monitoring, and a quarterly review of each broker’s development goals alongside their production numbers. This kind of structured peer learning — reviewing genuinely difficult scenarios as a team — tends to build capability faster than individual brokers working through the same problems alone.

Give Good Brokers Autonomy Without Losing Consistency

This is one of the genuine management tensions in running a brokerage with more than one or two brokers. Strong, experienced brokers often want independence in how they operate. Your business needs consistency in how clients are served, how files are documented, and how compliance obligations are met. Getting the balance wrong in either direction causes problems — too much control drives capable brokers away, too little creates inconsistent client experience and compliance risk.

The practical answer is to be explicit about which things are genuinely non-negotiable and which are left to broker discretion. Non-negotiables typically include compliance requirements, client record-keeping standards, CRM data standards, service commitments to clients, and brand requirements. Broker discretion can reasonably extend to relationship style, chosen niche, networking approach, and how they personally cultivate business development opportunities within the framework the business requires.

Being upfront about this distinction — rather than leaving brokers to discover where the line sits through trial and error — tends to reduce friction considerably. A broker who understands exactly what’s fixed and what’s flexible is far less likely to feel micromanaged, because the boundaries are clear rather than arbitrary.

Measure More Than Settlements

Settlement volume is the easiest number to track, but it’s an incomplete picture of a broker’s performance and doesn’t tell you much about where they need support or development. A more balanced scorecard gives you — and the broker — a clearer view of what’s actually happening.

Useful categories include production and conversion metrics such as enquiry-to-appointment and application-to-settlement rates; business development activity such as referral partner engagement and self-generated opportunities; client-facing measures such as service standards and retention; process discipline such as CRM data quality and file turnaround; and development measures such as training engagement and progress against agreed goals.

What constitutes a good number in any of these categories varies enormously by broker experience, business model and market, so rather than applying a universal benchmark, track each broker’s trend against their own history and against the expectations set for their specific role and stage.

Retention Starts Long Before Someone Considers Leaving

Most brokerage owners find out a good broker is unhappy only when they resign. By that point, the decision is usually already made, and a counter-offer rarely changes the outcome. Regular, genuine check-ins — sometimes called stay interviews — are a far more useful tool than waiting for a resignation and then scrambling to respond.

The distinction that matters here is the difference between asking “are you happy?” — which invites a polite, non-committal answer — and asking something more specific like “what’s getting in the way of you doing your best work here?” or “what would make this role meaningfully better over the next twelve months?” These questions surface real blockers — inconsistent lead flow, unclear progression, an admin burden that’s crept up, a management style that’s grating — while there’s still time to address them.

Give Strong Brokers Somewhere to Go

A capable broker who can see no future beyond their current role, other than doing the same job for another year, is a broker who will eventually look elsewhere — often by starting their own brokerage rather than joining a competitor, since they already have the skills to do so.

A credible progression pathway doesn’t have to mean a formal management track for everyone. Some technically excellent brokers have no interest in managing people and would rather grow as a senior producer or specialist. Others are genuinely suited to leadership, team responsibility, or eventually some form of partnership or equity arrangement. What matters is that the pathway exists and is discussed honestly, rather than assumed to be obvious or left unspoken. Where equity, profit share or partnership structures are genuinely being considered as a retention tool, these carry real legal, tax and valuation implications and should be worked through with an accountant, lawyer or other appropriate adviser rather than structured informally.

Examine Your Own Leadership Before You Look for the Next Hire

It’s tempting to treat broker turnover as a recruitment problem — find better people, offer a better split, try again. Often the more honest explanation sits closer to home. Founders who expect every team member to work with the same intensity and personal investment they bring themselves, without recognising that’s an unreasonable expectation of an employee or contractor, tend to see high turnover regardless of how good their recruitment process is.

Common, avoidable causes of turnover include expecting staff to operate like owners without owner-level reward or authority, changing expectations without communicating the change clearly, holding onto every decision rather than developing people to make some independently, failing to invest real time in coaching, tolerating inconsistent standards until performance visibly drops, and only engaging with a broker’s development when something has already gone wrong.

None of these are unusual failings — they’re common in growing businesses where the owner is still operating as the most experienced producer while also trying to lead a team. But recognising them honestly is often the more effective retention strategy than any recruitment tactic, because no amount of hiring solves a culture that capable people don’t want to stay in.

Learn Something When a Broker Does Leave

Even with a strong proposition and genuine attention to retention, brokers will sometimes leave — for a competitor, for their own business, or for reasons unrelated to your brokerage entirely. How that exit is handled matters both operationally and as a signal to the rest of your team.

A structured exit should cover a clear handover of client files and relevant referral relationships, appropriate access and data considerations, continuity of service for affected clients, and a genuine, unemotional root-cause conversation about why they’re leaving. Any restraint of trade, client ownership, trail commission or data considerations tied to the departure should be checked against the specific employment or contractor agreement in place, since these vary significantly and shouldn’t be assumed to work a particular way without confirming the actual terms.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What do good mortgage brokers actually look for when choosing a brokerage?

Beyond commission split, strong candidates typically weigh up lead quality and flow, the genuine level of operational and mentoring support on offer, the technology and systems they’ll be working with, and whether there’s a credible path to greater responsibility, seniority or ownership over time. The brokerages that stand out are usually the ones that can answer these questions specifically rather than in generalities.

2. Is commission split the most important factor in attracting brokers?

It matters, but it’s rarely the deciding factor on its own, particularly for established or high-performing brokers who are also weighing up lead access, support, autonomy and career progression. A strong split attached to a weak platform tends to attract brokers who leave again quickly once they realise what’s missing.

3. Should a brokerage provide leads to its brokers?

This depends on your business model, and there’s no single correct answer. What matters most is being explicit with brokers about which model applies — fully self-generated, centrally provided, or a hybrid — so expectations are set clearly before they join rather than discovered through frustration months in.

4. How long should a new broker’s ramp-up period be before they’re genuinely productive?

There’s no reliable industry-wide figure, since it depends heavily on the broker’s prior experience, the complexity of your business’s processes, and how much lead flow and mentoring support they receive. It’s more useful to track this against your own business’s history with previous hires than to assume a fixed timeframe.

5. How much autonomy should experienced brokers have?

Enough that they don’t feel micromanaged in how they build relationships and conduct business development, but with clear, non-negotiable standards around compliance, client record-keeping, CRM discipline and service commitments. Being explicit about which is which — rather than leaving brokers to guess where the line sits — tends to reduce friction considerably.

6. How do I stop a strong broker leaving to start their own brokerage?

There’s no guaranteed way to prevent this, since some brokers will always want full independence. What genuinely helps is making sure staying is commercially and professionally comparable to leaving — through genuine leadership opportunity, operational leverage they couldn’t easily replicate alone, and where appropriate, a real conversation about partnership or equity, worked through with proper professional advice rather than promised informally.

7. What should I do when a broker resigns?

Focus on a structured handover of client files and referral relationships, confirm access and data arrangements, and have an honest, non-defensive conversation about why they’re leaving so you can genuinely learn from it. Any contractual questions around restraint, trail or client ownership should be checked against the specific agreement in place rather than assumed.