Brokers Hit a Record 81.6% Share. The Same Year, $371bn Changed Lender — and 37% of It Left Through a Sale, Not a Refinance

Two numbers, one market

On 3 September the MFAA published its quarterly market share report — the 55th consecutive edition, dating back to 2013, with research by Cotality. Mortgage brokers facilitated 81.6% of all new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter. That is a record. It is up from 81.0% in the March 2026 quarter and 77.6% in the June 2025 quarter. In dollars, broker-originated residential lending totalled $139.08 billion for the quarter, $17.49 billion more than the same quarter a year earlier.

On 4 September, The Adviser reported an analysis by the Australian financial services technology firm Elula of APRA banking data for the year to 30 June 2026. Across that year, $371 billion of home loan balances moved between lenders. 664,000 customers switched — about 1,800 a day, or roughly $1 billion a day measured by balance. Churn rose by $41 billion, or 13%, on FY25, with 48,000 more customers leaving their lender than the year before.

Read on their own, the first is a good-news story about the channel and the second is a lender problem. Read together, they describe one market. And the second number is not only about the banks’ books. It is about yours.

What a record 81.6% actually changes

The temptation with a share record is to treat it as a scoreboard. It is more useful as a statement about who you now compete with.

For most of the last decade, the broker channel’s growth story was share taken from proprietary channels. Branch networks shrank, borrowers got more complicated, and the value of someone who knows forty credit policies compounded. That story is close to finished as a source of growth. When 81.6 cents in every dollar of new residential lending already comes through a broker, there are 18.4 cents left. Even capturing every remaining cent would only add about a fifth again to the channel — and no single brokerage captures a channel-level shift anyway.

The practical consequence is this. When one of your clients refinances away, the loan they move into is, on the same arithmetic, most likely a broker-written loan. Not a branch. Not a call centre. Another broker, with an aggregator panel that looks a lot like yours, running the same servicing calculators.

That reframes retention. It is no longer a defensive line held against the bank’s own retention team offering a rate hold. It is a competitive contest against a peer who is doing to your book precisely what you have been trained to do to theirs.

The 37% nobody has a trigger for

The single most useful figure in Elula’s analysis is not the headline. It is the split. According to the analysis as reported, 63% of churning borrowers were refinancing and 37% of the churn was linked to property sales.

Almost every retention tool this industry has built points at the 63%. Lender pricing alerts. Fixed-rate expiry lists. Annual review calendars. Aggregator flags when a client’s credit file is pinged. Rate-review email campaigns. Every one of them fires on a rate event or a date.

The 37% does not move for a rate. It moves because the client sold something. An upsize after a second child. A downsize once the last one leaves. A separation. A job that relocated to another city. An investment property cashed out after a capital gains conversation with an accountant. An estate being wound up.

On those figures, roughly 246,000 of the 664,000 customers who changed lender last financial year did so off the back of a property transaction. That is not a rounding error, and it has a particular quality: it is the one form of churn where you usually get months of warning and no system alert at all. The intent forms at a kitchen table, sometimes a year out. The signal your CRM finally receives is a discharge authority, by which point the new loan is conditionally approved somewhere else and the conversation is over.

Fewer enquiries, same volume of book on the move

The backdrop matters. Equifax’s Consumer Market Pulse for June 2026, as reported by The Adviser in July, put overall mortgage demand down 14% year on year. First home buyer enquiries were down 17.2%. Demand from 26- to 35-year-olds was down 18.2%. Refinancing enquiries to a different lender were down 15.1%; refinancing with the same lender was down 10.4%.

Kevin James, Equifax’s Chief Solutions Officer, described the shift in that release as consumers moving from proactive risk management to “a far more conservative, defensive approach”.

These are different measures and they do not net against each other — one counts applications in a single month, the other counts settled balance movement across a full year. But the direction is worth holding in the same frame. The pool of fresh enquiry is contracting while an enormous volume of existing balance keeps changing hands.

In a market shaped like that, the cheapest loan you will write next year is one you already own. Replacing a lost $700,000 loan costs you the acquisition, the fact-find, the assessment, the submission and the settlement — and, depending on how soon after settlement it discharges, may expose you to commission clawback. Clawback terms vary by lender and by aggregator agreement; if you cannot state yours from memory, that is worth an hour with your aggregator before you plan next year’s growth targets.

Where the balances are landing

Elula’s analysis also mapped who won and lost. As reported, Macquarie Bank grew at roughly 3.9 times the system rate, adding about $39 billion; CBA grew at around system; NAB, Westpac and ANZ each grew below system; and BOQ and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank contracted.

Josh Shipman, identified by The Adviser as Elula’s chief executive, said: “At this point in time, we are experiencing an almost perfect storm that is driving customer churn in the banking sector. Churn is accelerating due to cost-of-living challenges; government policy changes to negative gearing; rising interest rates; and falling property prices.”

For brokers the read is less about league tables than concentration. When growth clusters in a small number of lenders, panel behaviour follows: turnaround times stretch at the winners, credit appetite loosens at the ones losing balance, and the spread between the fastest and slowest lender on your panel widens. That is a servicing and expectation-setting issue on live files, not just a market observation.

The 90-minute back-book triage

This is a defined piece of work, not a mindset shift. Block out ninety minutes and run the following.

Retention is still regulated activity

A word of caution, because retention campaigns can drift. A conversation with an existing client that ends in a recommendation is a recommendation, whether the recommendation is to move or to stay put.

ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 273 Mortgage brokers: Best interests duty explains, in ASIC’s own words, “what ASIC looks for when we assess compliance with the best interests obligations in Pt 3-5A of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009”. The reasoning behind a recommendation to stay with an incumbent lender belongs in the file with the same care as the reasoning behind a recommendation to move.

If you are planning a campaign that nudges a segment of your existing clients toward a particular lender or product, the framing and the record-keeping should be signed off by your licensee’s compliance team rather than by a marketing calendar. This article is general information only — confirm how these obligations apply to your business with your licensee or compliance adviser.

What to watch next

Three things will tell you whether this week’s pairing was a moment or a trend. The September 2026 quarter MFAA report, due later in the year, will show whether 81.6% is a ceiling or a step. The next Equifax quarterly pulse will show whether external refinancing enquiries keep falling while balances keep moving — the tension at the centre of this story. And the monthly APRA ADI statistics will show whether the concentration Elula identified is holding, which is what determines how your panel behaves on live files.

The record share is genuinely worth celebrating; the channel earned it. But a record share of new lending and a record amount of existing lending on the move are the same market seen from two ends. Growing from here means winning a larger portion of a book that is changing hands faster than ever — and, first, holding onto your own.