How local market insight can strengthen your broker conversations

Give brokers a reason to engage

Strong broker relationships grow through relevant and useful conversations.
Your Business Development Managers may already understand a broker’s history with your organisation. They may know what that broker writes, which products they use and how often they engage.

But do they know what is happening in the broker’s local market?
A conversation can become more useful when your team can help the broker explore questions such as:

• What types of customers live in the area?
• What lending needs may be more common?
• Which products could be more relevant locally?
• Is customer demand reflected in the broker’s current activity?
• Are there opportunities that deserve a closer look?

These questions move the discussion beyond a general product message. They give the lender and broker a practical opportunity to explore the local market together.

Understand the area each broker serves

A broker does not operate in isolation. They work within a local market made up of different households, businesses and customer needs.

We can think of this area as the broker’s catchment. A catchment may be based on the area around a broker’s office or the broader market they serve. By analysing this area, your teams can build a clearer view of the customers a broker may encounter.

Experian’s Mosaic segmentation categorises Australian households into 14 groups and 52 types. It uses demographic, lifestyle, behavioural and channel characteristics to help organisations understand how household profiles differ across locations.

Local market insight may include:

• household and life-stage characteristics
• indicators of income and wealth
• business ownership
• digital and channel preferences
• mortgage credit demand
• other characteristics relevant to the agreed use case.

Even within one suburb, household profiles can vary. Understanding those differences can help your team consider which product conversations may be more useful in each broker catchment.
The purpose is not to identify individual customers for a broker. It is to understand the broader characteristics of an area and how these may relate to your customer and product profiles.

Connect local insight with your customer knowledge

A local market profile becomes more useful when you connect it with what you already know about your customers. The process can begin by analysing the customers who have used a particular product. Your team can then explore which household and demand characteristics appear more often among those customers.

The same characteristics can be assessed across broker catchments to identify locations that may have stronger product alignment. In one lender proof of concept, customers using one product were 2.5 times more likely than the average Australian household to belong to a particular Mosaic type. The analysis also found that 80% of customers for that product were associated with medium-to-high mortgage credit demand indicators.

This type of analysis may help your teams identify:

• catchments with stronger product alignment
• brokers operating near relevant customer groups
• areas with demand indicators but lower current activity
• product conversations that may be more relevant locally

It does not mean every household in an area will need, qualify for or choose a product. It means the local market has characteristics that may justify a closer look and a better-informed broker conversation.

Move from a broad network to focused conversations

Australia had 22,265 mortgage brokers as at September 2024. More than 7,000 were active in commercial lending during the six months to September 2024, a 24.21% increase from the previous year.

For lenders and their sales teams, these numbers show the breadth and growing diversity of the channel. They also reinforce the need to prioritise. No sales team can give every broker the same amount of attention.

Local market analysis can help your Business Development Managers understand:

• why a broker or location has been prioritised
• what is distinctive about the area
• which customer groups may be relevant
• which product conversation could be useful
• what questions to ask the broker.

This gives the team a practical reason to make contact, rather than relying on a general product message.

Turn insight into a useful conversation

Data becomes valuable when your teams can use it. A Business Development Manager does not need to present a broker with a complex model or a long list of statistics. They need a clear and responsible way to explain why a local opportunity could be worth exploring.

This is an invitation to explore. It is not a promise that the broker will generate a fixed number of leads or applications. The broker can respond with their own knowledge. They may confirm the signal, challenge it or add context the data does not show. That feedback makes the conversation useful for both sides.

See how this works in practice

In one Victorian proof of concept, Experian identified over 100 higher-potential brokers for both lender products .

The assessment included:

• counts of households within relevant Mosaic types
• the credit demand profile of each catchment
• the proportion of business-owning households
• alignment with the lender’s historic product customer profiles.
• Business Development Managers received a broker-level opportunity file to help them:
• assess whether the identified brokers had performed strongly in the past
• test the findings in real broker conversations
• use local market attributes as conversation starters
• share relevant customer and catchment profiles
• provide feedback on which signals were most useful.

The proof of concept was designed to test whether the analysis improved prioritisation and conversation quality before considering a broader rollout.

Test, learn and improve

Local insight should support a feedback loop. Your teams can test the opportunity indicators in real conversations and ask:

• Does the broker recognise the local customer profile?
• Does the insight confirm or challenge the sales team’s experience?
• Which local signals are most useful?
• Does the broker see an unmet customer need?
• What additional insight would improve the conversation?
• Is the opportunity strong enough to justify further activity?

Early measures could include:

• Business Development Manager confidence
• broker responses
• the number of conversations started
• the quality and relevance of those conversations
• opportunities identified for further investigation
• additional broker accreditations in priority areas.

Commercial performance and return on investment should be assessed over a longer period. Many other factors, including relationships, service, policy, pricing and market conditions, will influence the result.

Make the next conversation more relevant

Data cannot build a broker relationship on its own. Your people, products, service and expertise will continue to shape that relationship. Local market insight can help your teams decide where to start and what to discuss. It gives them a clearer view of the market around each broker and a more relevant way to explore potential customer needs.

In a market where brokers facilitate more than eight in 10 new residential home loans, bringing something useful to the broker conversation matters.

Frequently asked questions

Does broker catchment insight identify individual customers?
No. The approach uses agreed inputs and aggregated market information to assess broader household and demand characteristics within an area.

Can the data predict which brokers will perform?
No. It can support prioritisation and further investigation, but it does not predict broker behaviour or guarantee commercial outcomes.

How can Sales use the insight?
Sales teams can use it to prepare questions, prioritise relationships and compare local indicators with their knowledge of the broker.

How can Marketing use the insight?
Marketing can use the shared view to consider where awareness, audience engagement or product education may be relevant.

Can lenders start with a small proof of concept?
Yes. The approach can begin with a selected product, region, broker segment or territory before broader use is considered.