What document chasing costs a mortgage brokerage
Before we built Gatheroo, we spent 6 weeks calling mortgage brokers. Not to sell anything, there was nothing to sell yet. We wanted to know how they collected documents from clients, and what it cost them.
The answers were more consistent than we expected.
Most brokers put the time spent chasing client documents somewhere between five and ten hours a week.
Not preparing applications. Not advising clients. Not writing loans. Following up on things that had already been asked for.
Nobody had that time in a budget. Everybody absorbed it.
Where the hours go
The number surprises people until they break it down.
- There is the initial request, which is usually an email listing what you need.
- Then the partial response, where three of the seven documents arrive.
- Then the follow-up.
- Then the response to the follow-up, which contains one more document and a question about a fourth.
- Then the phone call, because it is faster than another email.
- Then the second phone call, because the first one did not result in anything arriving.
Somewhere in that sequence you also lose time to work that is invisible: opening the thread to remember what you already have, searching for an attachment that came through on a different day, checking whether the payslips you received cover the right period.
None of that is difficult. All of it is time, and none of it directly earning commissions.
Deadlines make it worse, not better
The brokers we spoke to were not just losing hours. They were losing them under pressure.
Missing a lender deadline is not a neutral event. An incomplete file does not get assessed and corrected, it gets returned, and the client waits while somebody else’s application moves ahead of theirs.
Several brokers described working evenings specifically to stay ahead of it, and more described the anxiety of not knowing whether they were ahead of it.
That second one is the more revealing answer.
The problem was not only the workload. It was the absence of any reliable way to see where a file stood without opening an inbox and reconstructing it.
What changes when volume goes up
A process built on email holds together at ten active applications. Most brokers can carry ten files in their head.
At forty it stops working, and it stops working in a particular way.
The individual tasks do not get harder. What breaks is your ability to know the state of everything at once. You can still chase any single client effectively. You can no longer tell, without checking, which of the forty need chasing today.
That is the point where brokerages usually hire. Sometimes that is the right call. Often the new person spends their first six months doing the same chasing, just in parallel, and the underlying process is unchanged.
Growing without adding admin means the process has to hold the state of the work, rather than the broker holding it.
What a different process looks like
The alternative is not more discipline. It is a structure that does the remembering, which is what Gatheroo does for mortgage brokers.
Build the request once. A refinance needs broadly the same documents every time. Built as a template with guided fields, clear instructions and conditional logic, it takes minutes to send and the client sees only the questions that apply to them. A PAYG applicant and a self-employed applicant get different requests from the same template.
Let the reminders do the chasing. Set the frequency, daily, every two days, weekly, and they run until the request is complete. This is the single largest recovery of the five to ten hours, because it removes the task that generated most of it.
See where every file stands without opening anything. A dashboard that distinguishes a client who has not opened your email from one who opened the request and stopped at the bank statements is telling you two different things. One needs a nudge. The other needs a phone call. Without that distinction you either chase everyone or chase nobody.
Keep the record as a by-product. Every view, submission and update is timestamped as it happens, which means the file evidences your process without anyone assembling it afterwards.
Why clients stall in the first place
This post is about the hours the chasing costs you.
There is a matching question on the other side of it, which is why clients are slow to respond at all.
The short answer is that it is rarely disorganisation. A long list of documents with no obvious starting point and no visible progress is a task most people put off, and the fix is in how the request is built rather than how firmly you follow up.
A 14-day free trial is available, no credit card required. Most brokers have their first template built and sent the same day.