Content ideas for mortgage brokers

The reason broker content dries up is almost never a shortage of subjects. It is that people sit down in front of a blank document and try to invent one, when the raw material is already sitting in their inbox, their call history and their declined cases.

What follows is a set of places to harvest from. Work through them and you will have more material than you can publish in a year.

The questions that cost you time on the phone

Any question you have answered more than three times is a piece of content, and the ones worth writing are the awkward ones. What happens if the valuation comes in low. Whether a payday loan settled four years ago still matters. What a lender means by a probationary period. Whether a joint application can proceed when one applicant has an IVA. Why an agreement in principle is not an offer.

Keep a running note. Every adviser drops in the question and the rough answer as it happens. Once a month somebody turns the top three into pieces. This costs almost nothing and produces the most useful material you will ever publish, because it is generated by demand rather than guesswork.

Declined and re-placed cases

Every case that a first lender turned down contains a lesson about criteria. Anonymise it heavily and write about the mechanism, not the client: what the underwriter objected to, why, and what evidence changed the answer.

This is the material generalist competitors cannot produce because they have not seen enough of it. It is also the material that makes an accountant or a solicitor decide you are worth referring to.

Lender bulletins and BDM conversations

You receive criteria updates constantly and mostly skim them. Read them for the ones that change who can borrow, then write the practical translation. A lender moving from four and a half to five times income for a defined professional group, or changing how it treats bank shifts, or accepting a shorter self-employment history, is directly actionable for someone searching tonight.

Two cautions. Do not name terms as though they are permanent, because they are not. And date the piece plainly so a reader can judge whether it is still current.

Your complaints and near-misses

Uncomfortable but valuable. Whatever caused a client to be confused, surprised or disappointed is a gap in explanation, and closing it in public serves everyone. If three clients have been startled by the size of a valuation fee, or by how long a lender took after submission, write the piece that sets expectations properly.

Under Consumer Duty you are expected to support client understanding rather than merely disclose. Content built from the points where understanding actually broke down is exactly that work.

The stages nobody explains

The journey between offer and completion is dead ground on almost every broker site. Nobody explains what a conveyancer is waiting for, what searches take, why a chain moves at the speed of its slowest link, what happens if an offer expires before completion, or what a client should do if their circumstances change halfway through.

Clients are anxious in this window and there is very little good writing about it. A clear explainer here gets sent between family members, which is a distribution mechanism no keyword tool will find for you.

Local, physical specifics

If you work a defined patch, write about what is actually there. The ex-local-authority blocks where lending is patchy and why. The listed terraces and what a lender wants to see. The employer whose bonus structure complicates affordability. The development where reservation deadlines are tight. The conveyancers who move quickly.

This is the only kind of local content that cannot be produced by someone in another county with a template, which is precisely why it works.

Seasonal and calendar hooks

UK mortgage activity has a shape. Enquiries build after New Year and through spring, the summer holidays slow chains, and remortgage volumes follow the maturity dates of fixed rates written two, three and five years ago. Budget statements and Bank of England announcements create bursts of client anxiety.

Plan a small number of pieces against those moments and publish before them, not during. A piece explaining what a base rate decision does and does not change for someone on a fix is worth having ready.

Client types you keep meeting

Rather than a page for every possible borrower, write properly about the two or three you genuinely see most. A firm doing a lot of NHS staff, or a lot of limited company contractors, or a lot of first-time buyers using a family deposit, should have one deep piece per group covering how lenders assess them, what evidence to gather, and what typically goes wrong.

Things you are asked to do that you refuse

Clients ask brokers to help with things that are not appropriate: overstating income, disguising the source of a deposit, describing a residential purchase as a let. Writing about why the answer is no, and what the legitimate route looks like instead, is unusual, honest and builds a lot of trust.

What to do with the list

Two constraints keep this useful. Publish fewer, better pieces rather than many thin ones, because a large archive of shallow pages is harder to keep accurate and does not earn attention. And remember that everything you publish is a financial promotion: it must be fair, clear and not misleading, so avoid implied guarantees about approval, rates or savings, and get it approved the way your firm or network requires.

Then set a review date on each piece at the moment you publish. Ideas are abundant. Maintenance is the scarce resource, and it is what decides whether the archive is an asset or a liability in three years.