Broker market share sits at 81%, but pre-approval-to-settlement conversion has dropped nearly twenty points in three years. The gap is operational. Alvo for Brokers exists to close it, starting with the benchmark dataset built across fifteen years inside the funnels that set the numbers.
MFAA data has broker market share at 81% of all new Australian residential loans in the March 2026 quarter, with $124.88 billion settled, the highest for any March quarter. The competition is no longer brokers versus banks. It is brokers versus brokers, and lender proprietary channels eating the same ground.
Across the funnels Alvo has measured, the two stages absorbing 75-85% of total leakage are Account Created and Contact Progressing. Most brokerages have never been benchmarked on either, and the gap between knowing and not knowing is worth tens of settlements a year.
AI tooling now compresses the fix. Voice agents handling after-hours enquiries, automated nurture for leads stuck at contact attempted, refinance-versus-purchase routing on enquiry signal. All off-the-shelf builds today.
The Alvo for Brokers benchmark dataset is drawn from fifteen years building and running client acquisition funnels for brokers at Domain Group and Domain Home Loans, the joint venture between Domain and Lendi Group (Aussie), working with lender partners including CBA, Westpac, ANZ, NAB and Macquarie Bank. Industry-side counterparties in the data are anonymised throughout. The data is not.
The dataset is refreshed annually and cross-referenced against the most recent twelve months of broker audits Alvo has run. It covers the full waterfall: CTR, Account Created, Contact, CP (Contact Progressing), STL, Unconditional, Settlement, plus the appointment-booking parallel.
We bring working familiarity with the aggregator landscape from LMG to Finsure, the MFAA data that benchmarks the industry, the standard broker tech stack and the operational reality of running a 10-50 broker brokerage. The recommendations are grounded in those constraints, not abstracted from them.
Recent work. A working growth-engine prototype for a Sydney residential and commercial brokerage, built as part of a growth diagnostic: a revenue radar across the existing client book, a funnel calculator benchmarked against Domain Home Loans conversion waterfalls, and designed nurture journeys, plus concept designs for document intake and compliance-note drafting.
Drawn from the brokerages we have audited and the funnel work we ran at Domain Group and Domain Home Loans over the prior decade.
Click-through and calculator submission look healthy across most brokerages we have measured. The drop happens at Account Created, and again at the nudge after the first contact attempt. Those two stages absorb 75 to 85 percent of total leakage and almost no brokerage has been benchmarked on either.
If the only enquiries you treat as serious are the ones who phone or email, you are reading the smallest, latest-stage cohort of the funnel and ignoring everything upstream of it. Repeat visits to the refinance page. Multiple opens of the rate-update email. The borrowing-power calculator run three times in five days from the same device. The pre-approval that qualified out at first contact but is still opening the follow-ups eight weeks later. Every one of those is intent signal. Almost no brokerage routes them differently from a cold form submission, and the brokerages that do are operating from a different conversion ceiling to the ones that do not.
Most CRMs treat a missed first call as a failed contact and route the lead into a generic nurture flow. The leads are recoverable. The structured recovery is just not built. The brokerages we have benchmarked at the top of the band have a measured second-touch rate and can name it.
It is built for lender connectivity, compliance and file integrity. It is not built for conversion. The brokerages winning the current cycle are running their acquisition and nurture layer alongside the aggregator stack, not inside it, and the distinction is now a competitive one.
Single yes-or-no decision. Twenty-plus percentage point effect on whether the lead picks up. It is not the most interesting observation on this list. It is the cheapest one to fix.
Almost none can name their no-pickup recovery rate, their refinance-versus-purchase conversion split, or their Contact-to-CP percentage. That is a tooling gap, not a discipline gap. And it is the gap that decides which brokerages move and which ones drift.
Across the Domain Home Loans funnel, one in four to one in five clients who had agreed to proceed actually reached lodgement, and the two reasons they fell out never changed: they did not proceed with the purchase, or their bank came back with a better deal direct. Retention risk starts the day the client agrees to proceed, not at clawback.
Exchanged and refinance clients went unconditional at 75% inside 45 days. Pre-approvals converted at 35% with a 120-to-150-day lag. Most brokerages report both as one pipeline number, which is why the forecast is always wrong.
Refinance-intent messaging progressed contacts at 25 to 28 percent. Curiosity messaging like borrowing-power calculators ran at about 10 percent, on the same funnel with the same brokers. Which message a lead arrived on tells you more about their conversion odds than anything your CRM records afterwards.
Free 16-page PDF. The two waterfalls, the messaging library, the eight scoring dimensions. The conversion ranges the channels actually hit, not aspirational targets.
Get the report ›Free URL audit. Paste your broker URL plus LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Returns a one-page scorecard on the eight dimensions in under 60 seconds.
Run the audit ›A workshop for your brokers and ops leaders: what the benchmark data says about your funnel and what to do about it.
A structured audit of your funnel against the benchmark. A 20-25 page diagnostic with a dollar value attached to every fix. Priced at ~$5,000, subject to scope.
Ongoing advisory for principals and ops leaders. A consistent operator perspective as the AI tooling landscape moves.
Implementation covering landing pages, calculators, CRM workflows, voice agents and automated nurture. Scoped to your brokerage, optimising monthly thereafter.
Not sure where the leakage is in your funnel? Start with the benchmark, or talk to Alvo about a full audit.
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