Mortgage broker admin checklist

Admin in a brokerage is rarely one job. It is roughly six jobs stitched together, and each one has its own failure mode. Enquiry admin fails by going cold. Fact-find admin fails by being incomplete. Application admin fails by being wrong. Offer admin fails by being slow. Completion admin fails by being silent. Post-completion admin fails by simply never happening.

This checklist is organised by those six moments rather than by who does the work, because in a small firm the same person often does all of it and in a larger firm the boundaries move around. Treat it as a starting draft to argue with, not a standard.

Enquiry

• Log the enquiry the same working day, with source recorded accurately rather than as "referral" for everything.
• Capture a callback preference and a phone number that has been dialled at least once successfully.
• Record whether the client has a property found, an offer accepted, a deadline, or is browsing. These four states need entirely different urgency.
• Send the initial disclosure material your firm uses, and log that you sent it.
• Diary a second attempt if the first call does not connect. Two attempts on different days at different times catches far more people than three attempts on the same afternoon.

Fact find and research

• Confirm identity and complete anti-money-laundering checks before spending serious research time.
• Establish employment shape early: employed, self-employed sole trader, limited company director, contractor, or a mixture. The mixture cases are the ones that unravel late.
• Ask about credit history in plain language rather than waiting for a search to reveal it.
• Note anything relevant to how the client absorbs information, makes decisions, or copes with stress, and record it in a way that is factual rather than a label.
• Save the sourcing evidence at the point of research, not reconstructed afterwards.
• Write the reason for the recommendation while the conversation is fresh. The reason is the part that ages worst.

Application

• Cross-check the figures on the application against the underlying documents rather than against the fact find. The fact find can be wrong in the same direction twice.
• Confirm names exactly as they appear on identity documents, including middle names and spellings that autocorrect likes to fix.
• Check the address history covers the required period without gaps of a few weeks that get glossed over.
• Confirm deposit source and the paper trail behind it before submission, particularly where a gift is involved.
• Note the lender reference, the submission timestamp and the named contact route in one place.
• Set an expectation with the client for when they will next hear from you, and make it a date rather than "soon".

Between submission and offer

• Diary a check on the case at an interval based on the lender's current service, not a fixed number you set two years ago.
• Log every lender contact with the date, the channel and the substance. "Chased" is not a note.
• When a condition or document request arrives, forward it to the client the same day with a plain explanation of what it is and why it is needed.
• Track valuation status separately from underwriting status. They fail independently.
• Tell the client when nothing has happened. Silence is read as a problem.

Offer to completion

• Read the offer properly, including the conditions and the expiry date, before sending it on.
• Diary the offer expiry with a warning well ahead of it, because extensions take longer than people expect.
• Confirm the conveyancer has what they need from you and knows who to contact.
• Confirm the protection conversation has happened or has been declined on record. This is the point where it quietly gets skipped.
• Check buildings cover is arranged in time for exchange where that applies.
• Keep a light touch on the chain. You are not the conveyancer, but you are often the only person the client will ring.

After completion

• Send the completion message quickly. It is the cheapest goodwill in the business.
• Diary the product end date and set the review contact ahead of it, working back from when the client can realistically act.
• Ask for a review or referral once, well, at a moment when the client is pleased, rather than three times awkwardly.
• Archive the case file so that a stranger could reconstruct what was advised and why.
• Record the final fee or procuration fee actually received against what was expected, and investigate gaps.

Making a checklist survive contact with a real week

Checklists rot for predictable reasons. They get long, so people skim them. They live in a document nobody opens. They describe an ideal week rather than a busy one. They are written by whoever cares most about compliance and read by whoever is busiest.

Three habits keep one alive.

First, put each item where the work happens. An item that lives inside the case record as a required field or a task will be done. The same item in a shared drive will not.

Second, separate the items that block progress from the items that are merely good practice. If everything is mandatory, nothing is. A small number of hard gates, honestly enforced, beats forty soft ones.

Third, review it after the cases that went badly. A case that took eleven weeks instead of six usually teaches you exactly one missing item. Add that item and remove one that has never once caught anything.

Fee, disclosure and record points to confirm with your own compliance route

Some of the items above have a regulatory dimension: what you must disclose about fees and scope, what identity evidence you must hold, how long records must be kept, and what your suitability documentation must contain. The specifics differ depending on whether you are directly authorised or an appointed representative of a network, and networks often impose requirements that go beyond the baseline.

Do not take the retention periods, disclosure wording or file content requirements from a checklist you found online, including this one. Confirm them against the FCA Handbook or your network's compliance manual, and build your firm's version of this list around those confirmed requirements. What is offered here is operational structure, not compliance advice.

The value of a checklist is not that it is comprehensive. It is that the small number of things that reliably destroy a case are impossible to forget.