How to reduce mortgage broker case chasing

Chasing is the tax a brokerage pays for uncertainty. Nobody chases a case they can see. They chase because they do not know whether the valuation has been booked, whether the underwriter has picked it up, whether the client sent the statement, or whether the solicitor has heard anything — and because a client has just asked them.

So the way to reduce chasing is not to chase more efficiently. It is to reduce the number of things nobody can see.

Work out who you are actually chasing

Spend a fortnight logging every chase with one word: lender, client, solicitor, valuer, employer, accountant, estate agent, network, insurer. Most firms are surprised by the result. The intuition is that lenders absorb the effort; the log usually shows that clients and their documents account for more of it, and that solicitors generate the most repeat contact per case.

That distinction matters because the remedies are completely different. Client chasing is fixed by expectation-setting and by making the ask easier. Lender chasing is fixed by knowing service levels and by not asking before there is anything to know. Solicitor chasing is largely fixed by accepting you are not in the chain and telling the client so clearly.

Client chasing: the ask is usually the problem

When a client does not send a document, the usual cause is not reluctance. It is that the request was vague, arrived in a long email, asked for six things at once, or required them to find a paper document while at work.

Things that measurably reduce repeat asks:

• Ask for one thing at a time when the list is long, in the order you need them.
• Say what the document looks like and where it usually comes from, in plain words. "Your last three months of bank statements, the PDF version you can download from your banking app, not screenshots."
• Explain why it is needed. Clients comply far more readily when the reason is obvious.
• Give a date, not a vague urgency.
• Make the upload route work on a phone, because that is where it will be done.
• Send the reminder from the same thread, so the original instruction is visible above it.

If your firm sends a "just checking in" message with no specific ask, that is not a chase, it is noise, and it trains clients to skim.

Lender chasing: know the service level before you ring

Ringing a lender before their published or observed turnaround has elapsed achieves nothing except occupying two people. Keep a simple internal record of how long each lender is currently taking at each stage, updated from your own completed cases rather than from rumour. Set your diary dates from that, and revise it monthly.

Where a lender offers a portal, a case-tracking feed or an integration with your CRM, use it and stop phoning. Where they do not, batch your calls rather than making them as the thought occurs. One block of lender calls on the same two mornings each week is dramatically more efficient than nine interruptions across five days.

Record the substance of every lender conversation in the case, not just that it happened. A large fraction of repeat calls are made because the previous answer was not written down.

The chase that comes from the client asking you

A meaningful share of chasing starts with a client email that says "any news?" Every one of those is a signal that your communication rhythm is not matching their anxiety.

Get ahead of it. Tell the client at submission roughly how long each stage takes and when they will hear from you. Then contact them on that schedule whether or not there is news, because a message saying nothing has changed and here is what happens next removes the anxiety just as effectively as a message with news in it.

Firms that adopt a fixed update rhythm typically see inbound client contact fall sharply within a couple of months. The updates cost less than the interruptions did.

Make the pipeline answer questions without a human

If an adviser has to ask an administrator what is happening on a case, that is an internal chase, and it is the easiest kind to eliminate. It requires only that the case record is genuinely current and that everyone trusts it.

Trust is the hard part. A record that is right most of the time gets ignored, because people cannot tell which parts are stale. Two things build trust: an update convention that everyone follows without exception, and a visible timestamp of when the case was last touched, so that a reader can judge for themselves.

Diary rather than remember

Every case should carry a dated next action at all times. When a chase is made and produces nothing, the outcome is a new date, not an open worry. This sounds trivial and it changes behaviour completely, because it converts a background hum of anxiety into a scheduled task.

The corollary is that a case with no future date is a defect. Reviewing those weekly catches the ones about to be forgotten.

Watch out for chasing that is really something else

Some chasing is a symptom rather than a habit.

If the same lender repeatedly comes back with queries, the packaging is weak and the fix is upstream. If a particular adviser generates far more document chasing than others, their fact-find conversation is probably skipping the document conversation. If clients routinely go quiet after the fee is disclosed, that is not a chasing problem at all.

Look at what you are chasing about, not just how often.

A reasonable target

Do not try to eliminate chasing. Some contact is the service, and a client who hears from you unprompted at a difficult moment remembers it. What you are aiming at is the elimination of contact that exists only because information was unavailable.

Measure it crudely: count outbound chase contacts per completed case for a month, then again three months after making changes. If it has not fallen, the changes were cosmetic.

The firms that chase least are rarely the ones with the most automation. They are the ones where everybody knows where every case is.