When to hire another mortgage broker, and when the leads can wait.

Hire another mortgage broker when leads that need a broker are going uncalled and the brokers you have are full, because a hot lead cools within hours. If your team is keeping up, the empty seat costs close to nothing, and waiting until the deal flow proves itself is a fair call.

The bottom line: An empty broker seat only costs money when leads that need a broker are sitting unworked, and then it costs you every day they wait. FinTalent’s advice is to count what went unworked last month before you decide, because that count tells you whether you need a broker, a support seat or more patience.

What does it look like when a brokerage has more leads than brokers?

Principals raise it themselves, usually while explaining why they want to hire.

A co-principal with hundreds of referrals a month and one broker told us “he’s not even calling every single hot lead that’s coming through because he can’t.” The head of a lending business inside a financial advice group said a third of the group’s advisers were eager to send referrals, and the gap was a person to meet them regularly: “We just need the person to be connecting with them.”

Another principal went further. When we said finding the business is the hardest part of broking, they cut in with “I’ve got leads, bro. I’ve got so many clients that I can’t deal with it.” Moments earlier they had described a list of hundreds of people they had met once and never followed up, “a huge amount that I’ve just laid to waste.”

This spring a sales coach referred a brokerage to us with the line “we have the deals to give”, then followed up with “Need a loan writer as leads galore”. The guide Short of leads, or short of conversion opens on another founder in the same position.

Every one of these businesses had demand inside the building and nobody free to work it. That is a different problem from a brokerage that is short of leads, and it needs a different answer.

What does an empty broker seat cost when the leads are already there?

It costs whatever the uncalled leads would have settled, and the price rises by the hour.

A US study published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 sent a test web enquiry to 2,241 companies. Only 37% replied within an hour, 23% never replied, and those that replied within 30 days took 42 hours on average. A second study of 1.25 million leads found firms that tried to make contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more.

It is US data from 2011 and covers many industries, none of them Australian broking, so read it for the direction rather than the rate. Referral work decays in its own way. The head of the lending business above wants a broker who goes back to the group’s advisers at the start of every month to ask what clients they are seeing, “not meeting them once and then not meeting them again.”

The cost of a vacancy calculator puts a dollar figure on the seat from your average loan, deals a month, commission rates and split, and counts the trail that never starts.

Where hot leads are going uncalled, the vacancy has a real price and it grows every day the seat sits empty. Where nothing is waiting, the honest input for deals a month is much lower, and so is the cost.

When is the cost of a vacancy really zero?

When the team you have can keep up.

We asked one principal what it would cost the business to go without the hire until the volume they expected arrived. They said “we can still keep up even though we don’t have that person”, so “the cost could be zero.” They would not put a number on it either: “If I give you a figure I’ll just make something up.” They were hiring ahead of volume they knew was coming, and while their team kept up, they were right.

Two other principals come at it from the other side and will not add capacity until the deals turn up. One founder told us “I don’t really want to make the investment in additional capacity until I see the deal flow.” A principal expecting a new source of referrals to switch on said “I basically just don’t want to fall over, but I also don’t want to stress the existing team out”, and that they would hire “when I see the leads”.

Waiting is a fair position, and it carries one risk, which is the lag. A search, a notice period, aggregator onboarding and lender accreditation all sit between the day the leads land and the day a new broker writes a loan, and how long a broker hire takes sets out each stage.

Lead quality belongs in the same sum. Most leads never become a loan, and the leads-provided promise puts numbers on how few do, so count the ones that need a broker this month rather than the total.

Zero is an honest answer while the team keeps up. It stops being true the day leads start waiting, and by then the search is already behind.

Are brokerages still hiring when mortgage lodgements are falling?

The ones with their own lead source are, because a softer market does not empty a queue that is already there.

The softening is real. AFG’s residential lodgements were down 16% on the year before in the financial year to date, to 11 August, with investor lodgements down 18% and owner-occupier down 14%, and the falls were sharpest in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland, as MPA reported alongside its full-year results. That is one aggregator’s lodgements over about six weeks. The ABS measure is broader, and new dwelling loan commitments fell 5.4% in number from the March quarter to the June 2026 quarter, with investor commitments down 8.6%.

Brokers took a bigger share of what was written. They arranged a record 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, up from 77.6% a year earlier and 53.9% in June 2018, and $139.08 billion in new home lending, $17.49 billion more than the same quarter of 2025, according to the MFAA. Across calendar 2025, the MFAA’s first State of Mortgage and Finance Broking report counted 838,815 loans settled through brokers, up 17.2%, against a broker population up 9.1% to 24,116, as Australian Broker reported. The rest is in what the MFAA numbers say about your next hire.

Falling lodgements shrink the pool, and brokers are writing a bigger share of it. Neither number tells you what is waiting in your own CRM, which is the count that decides this hire.

Why does it matter who owns the lead?

Because most broker business comes through relationships, and somebody owns each one. In the MFAA’s Value of Mortgage and Finance Broking 2025 report, prepared by Deloitte from a survey of nearly 900 brokers, brokers named repeat customers (44%) and referrals (28%) as by far their main sources of business.

That splits brokerages that are hiring into two groups. Where the business owns the source (a referral program, an adviser network, a property database or a partner feeding it deals), the shortage is hands, and a new broker can start on warm work. Where every broker brings their own clients, the growth question is demand, and an experienced hire arrives with a book, a trail position and often a restraint to work through, which is what recruiting experienced brokers deals with.

Both sides of the hire carry a fear. The principal fears paying a broker to sit idle if the source underdelivers, which is why the two principals above are waiting for the leads first. The broker’s fear runs the other way, a seat sold on lead flow that never arrives and no book of their own to fall back on. The leads-provided piece covers the broker’s side, and what your split is really buying covers the trade a business makes when it supplies the leads.

Know which group you are in before you write the brief. It decides who you hire, what you pay them and what you can honestly promise them.

Should the next hire be a broker or a support seat?

It depends on what the waiting leads need.

A hot referral that needs advice, structuring and a lender needs a broker. That was the co-principal’s position, with referrals arriving faster than one broker could ring them. The advice group needed a broker too, and a particular kind, “someone who is actively investing their time in the referral partner space”, going back to the same advisers every month.

The principal sitting on hundreds of one-meeting prospects had a different pile. Those people needed a call back and a reason to come in, and our suggestion on that call was a client services manager to keep them warm and book them in, leaving the strategy conversation with the principal. The Are you the constraint guide separates a queue of work from a queue of decisions, your first hire will make or break you makes the case for support before production, and the first operations hire covers the point where the bottleneck is the principal.

When the answer is another broker, the work is a search, and Joe runs every one himself. The mortgage broker recruitment page sets out how that search runs.

Match the seat to what the waiting leads need before you write the brief. A broker hired to make call backs is a costly way to fill a support seat.

A test to run before you hire

Take last month and count these. Each one points to a different answer.

The first row is the one to put a price on, and the cost of a vacancy calculator does that with your own loan size and split.