Mortgage brokers wrote 77.3% of all new home loans in the September 2025 quarter — a record, up 2.7 percentage points year-on-year and a striking 5.8 points above the 71.5% recorded just two years earlier. The channel has never been stronger. That is exactly why now is the moment to think about risk, not just to take a victory lap.

Dominance changes how you are seen. When brokers wrote half the market, the way they were paid and supervised was an industry matter. At better than three-quarters, it becomes a public-policy matter — systemically important, politically visible, and squarely in the field of view of regulators, lenders and competition watchers. Record share is a position of strength. It is also a magnet for scrutiny.

The numbers, and the direction

The trajectory is as important as the level. Broker share has climbed from 71.5% to 77.3% in two years, driven by exactly the conditions of the current cycle: borrowers navigating a 4.35% cash rate, a refinancing wave, tightening credit and shifting product structures have leaned on professional advice. Aggregator leaders — from Mortgage Choice through AFG — forecast continued growth, pointing to consumers seeking out “trusted professionals” as conditions stay complex. At the top end, Aussie reclaimed the number-one brokerage position, its active brokers settling more than $28 billion in FY25.

This is a channel winning on merit. None of what follows takes that away. But strength and exposure travel together, and the brokers who do best from here will be the ones who hold both ideas at once.

Why dominance invites scrutiny

There is a simple dynamic at work: the larger a distribution channel becomes, the more its economics are treated as everyone’s business. Three scrutiny vectors matter for brokers.

1. Remuneration

How brokers are paid — upfront, trail and clawback — has been examined before and remains the most politically sensitive feature of the model. The recent shift on clawback shows the settings are not fixed. At 77% share, any future review of broker pay is no longer a niche industry consultation; it is a mainstream one.

2. Conduct and Best Interests Duty

ASIC’s ongoing monitoring of Best Interests Duty, complaints handling and audit practices is the live edge of conduct scrutiny. As the channel grows, the regulator’s interest in whether brokers consistently meet their obligations grows with it.

3. Competition and channel power

When one channel intermediates the overwhelming majority of lending, questions follow about lender-channel dynamics, vertical integration between aggregators and lenders, and whether the structure serves consumers. None of these is an accusation — they are simply the questions that arrive with scale.

The lesson history already taught the channel

Brokers do not have to imagine what scrutiny of a dominant channel looks like — they lived through it. The Financial Services Royal Commission put broker remuneration under a national spotlight, floated changes that would have reshaped the model, and left the industry to win back its standing through conduct and the Best Interests Duty that followed. The channel emerged stronger, but the episode established a pattern worth remembering: when the broker model becomes prominent enough, its economics become a public conversation — and that conversation can move quickly.

The difference in 2026 is that the channel is far larger than it was then. Three-quarters of new lending now flows through brokers. That scale is a shield in one sense — the channel is too important to consumers to dismantle lightly — and an exposure in another, because anything that large attracts continuous, rather than occasional, attention. The recent shift on clawback is a live reminder that remuneration settings are not frozen in place.

Your strategic risk map

You cannot control the regulatory weather. You can make your business resilient to it. Five priorities turn record share from a complacency risk into a durable advantage.

1. Make BID evidence your licence to operate. Audit-grade file notes and a consistent, documented process are the single best protection against conduct scrutiny — and they are entirely within your control.
2. Build value beyond rate. If your contribution is purely price comparison, you are the most exposed layer to technology and disintermediation. Advice, structuring, problem-solving and retention are harder to automate away.
3. Stress-test against a remuneration change. Model how your business would absorb a shift in the pay structure. The exercise alone reveals how concentrated your revenue really is.
4. Professionalise deliberately. Education, repeatable process and a credible brand are what separate a resilient practice from a volume-dependent one when the cycle turns.
5. Diversify revenue. Asset and commercial finance, structured retention and referral income reduce reliance on a single residential pay model.

Three questions for your next business review

The strategic response is not anxiety; it is a handful of honest questions asked while conditions are good. First: if upfront or trail commissions changed materially, what would happen to my revenue, and how long could the business absorb it? Second: what would a client say my value actually is — and is that answer something a comparison website could replicate? Third: if a compliance reviewer pulled ten of my files at random tomorrow, would my reasoning stand on its own without me in the room to explain it?

None of those questions is comfortable, which is precisely why they are useful. A broker who can answer all three confidently is, almost by definition, running a resilient practice — diversified enough to survive a pay-model change, valuable enough to resist commoditisation, and documented enough to withstand conduct scrutiny. A broker who cannot has just found their priorities for the next two quarters.

Frequently asked

What a resilient practice looks like from here

It helps to picture the broker who sails through whatever scrutiny scale invites. Their revenue does not rest on a single residential pay line — there is asset or commercial finance in the mix, a worked database generating repeat and referral business, and retention income that does not evaporate the moment a rate moves. Their value to a client is something a comparison site cannot reproduce: structuring, problem-solving, and steadying a borrower through a stressful decision. And their files are clean enough that a random audit would be an inconvenience rather than a threat, because the reasoning behind every recommendation is written down in their own words.

None of that requires predicting the next regulatory move. It simply requires building the kind of business that does not depend on the weather staying fair. Record share has handed the channel the time and the confidence to do exactly that — the only mistake would be to read dominance as a reason to stop building. The brokers who treat this moment as a prompt to diversify, professionalise and document will look, in hindsight, like the ones who saw it coming.

The bottom line

Seventy-seven per cent is a number to be proud of and to respect. The channel has earned its dominance by being useful through a hard cycle. The task now is not to grow share — that is happening — but to defend the conduct, value and professionalism that justify it. Brokers who read record share as a signal to sharpen, rather than to settle, will be the ones still standing tall when the scrutiny that follows scale eventually arrives.