Some banks and lenders offer tiered service to mortgage brokers who meet certain quality benchmarks when submitting home loan applications.
In return for less rework on applications, brokers can get faster turnaround times on applications they submit and approvals where other brokers cannot.
What does priority service mean for borrowers?
- Faster turnaround times: Your home loan application will be assessed within 24 hours compared to 3-5 days.
- Shorter time to settlement: We can sometimes reach settlement in less than two weeks from mortgage pre-approval.
- Access to credit specialists: These key decision-makers can make or break your application if you don’t quite meet lending requirements.
- Advice on loan structuring: In this way, you can get a home loan that better aligns with how you manage your finances and your long-term goals.
Many of our mortgage brokers have priority or elite status with Australia’s largest banks and lenders.
Call us on 1300 889 743 or complete our free assessment form to find out why we’re the mortgage broker of choice for thousands of borrowers.
Does your mortgage broker have priority status?
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are tiered depending on how mortgage brokers measure up against the lenders’ quality score.
Some examples of priority service tiers include:
- Commonwealth Bank (CBA): Essential and Elite.
- Westpac: Standard, Gold, and Platinum.
- St George: Flame, Flame Office, Gold, Accredited and Complex (including self-employed).
- Suncorp: Accredited and Elite.
What about other lenders?
Other major lenders such as National Australia Bank (NAB) ANZ, BankWest, Macquarie and Bank of Queensland (BoQ) scrapped or fundamentally changed broker segmentation around 2012.
How do brokers achieve top priority status?
Mortgage brokers that achieve priority status with lenders need to meet strict requirements, so they tend to be better than brokers that don’t have this status.
These requirements pertain to lenders’ customer accuracy rate (CAR) benchmarks, the number of applications the broker submits, and the overall quality of their submissions.
Submissions need to be submitted accurately and in full in order to avoid rework and delays:
- Evidence of funds to complete: This includes evidence of genuine savings or property equity to cover the cost of settlement and property purchasing costs like stamp duty.
- Income evidence: Up-to-date verification of employment income and/or rental income.
- Complete liabilities and expenses: All accounts including credit cards, personal loans, and higher education debt (HELP).
- Evidence of security: The Contract of Sale must be completed and signed.
- Compliance: The application must meet the requirements set out under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (NCCP Act) and other financial services regulation.
- Conversion: Lenders want submissions from borrowers that actually meet their lending criteria.
To achieve elite status, some lenders require brokers to achieve a CAR rating of 85% or more.
The scorecard is no longer based on loan volumes
In the past, broker segmentation was based largely on the number of loans a broker submitted with any one lender, also known as loan volume.
Following reviews into the financial services and mortgage broking industry, it was determined that relying heavily on loan volume created a conflict of interest instead of delivering better quality customer outcomes.
Volume must now be no more than 30% of the priority service scorecard.
Some lenders have since removed this volume requirement entirely while others have switched from a dollar-based volume benchmark to a loan number benchmark.
For example, one major bank requires brokers to submit to them 12 submission per half year, no matter the total amount borrowed.
In saying that, they still require the broker to meet loan quality benchmarks.
Do elite brokers receive higher commission?
Mortgage brokers with priority status do not receive higher commissions, nor do they have access to special interest rates.
They must still disclose their status to you but what you get out of it is a much faster and smoother home loan application process.
Get a fast home loan approval
Call us on 1300 889 743 or complete our online enquiry form to start your home buying journey today.
Learn more about why we’re Australia’s leading specialist mortgage broker.