Which channels produced loans that actually funded?

Commercial broker fees typically run one to two per cent of the loan. On a million-dollar loan that is ten to twenty thousand dollars; on five million it is fifty to a hundred thousand. Both arrive as one enquiry.

Any report built on enquiries or even on closed deals therefore misses the only variable that matters. A channel producing half the volume at four times the average loan size is the best channel you have, and every dashboard you own will rank it fourth.

Ranking on collected fees fixes it in one step, and does so using the same closing records the firm already keeps for its own accounting.

Term sheets are issued and withdrawn, appraisals come in short, borrowers go direct to their bank at the last minute. A meaningful share of everything in the pipeline never funds, and the share differs by source.

Counting only funded loans, with the fee actually collected, removes that noise. It also means the report is reconcilable to the firm's revenue, which is the difference between a marketing number and a number the principal will act on.

Commercial debt has a term, and a term has an end date. A five-year fixed loan placed today matures on a date everyone involved already knows, and at some point before it the borrower will need to refinance, sell, or negotiate an extension. That is not a speculative future opportunity to be guessed at; it is a dated event sitting in the brokerage's own files, attached to a borrower whose deal the firm has already done once, whose property it already understands and whose lender it already knows. Very few marketing channels start from that position.

Most brokerages work that list informally and hope for the best. Somebody remembers, or a diary reminder fires eighteen months out, or the borrower rings first because they were happy last time and could not be bothered to shop. Whether the maturity list is being worked properly, and what it produces relative to the money being spent chasing new borrowers who have never heard of the firm, is not something any report in the business answers. The maturity list is not thought of as a marketing channel at all, so it is never in the comparison.

Uploading it as a source file prices it for the first time. Fees collected on refinances are ranked directly against fees collected from paid search, referral relationships and outbound calling, over whatever period the firm chooses to look at. Because the original enquiry also stays in the data, a borrower first won through a campaign four years ago and refinanced twice since keeps crediting that campaign rather than the diary reminder. That is the only honest way to value a channel in a business where the same borrowers return on a predictable cycle.

Brokers in this market compete on the breadth and quality of their lender relationships. Knowing which life company will look at a secondary market, which bank is lending on hospitality this quarter, which debt fund will stretch on leverage and who to ring on a Friday afternoon when a closing is slipping is the genuine expertise, and it is what the borrower is really paying for. Firms therefore spend heavily on conferences, association memberships, sponsorships and the travel that maintains all of it, year after year.

None of that is marketing in the sense a report understands, and it should not be measured as though it were. The lender side produces capacity, optionality and speed; it does not produce deals. What the advertising budget buys is borrowers. The two get discussed interchangeably in partner meetings because both are filed under business development and both are defended by the same people, and the confusion costs the firm real money in both directions: the relationship budget is asked to justify a pipeline it never promised, and the borrower budget escapes scrutiny it deserves.

Keeping them apart is much of the point of ranking on collected fees. A conference that produced three new lender relationships and no borrowers has done something genuinely valuable and should be argued for on exactly those grounds, not defended with a fabricated pipeline figure that will be checked and found wanting. A campaign that produced two funded borrowers can be argued for with a number that ties to the accounts. Both arguments get stronger the moment the report stops pretending they are the same argument.

Commercial mortgage work is co-brokered constantly. A local broker who knows the sponsor brings the relationship, a specialist places the debt with a lender the first broker has no access to, a correspondent takes a share for servicing, and a firm in another market takes a referral cut for the introduction that started it. The fee printed at the top of the term sheet and the money that eventually reaches the brokerage's own account can be very different figures, and the gap between them varies enormously from one file to the next.

That makes deal size a poor proxy for value in a way that compounds the existing problem of ranking on loan amount. A channel producing large co-brokered transactions can look like the strongest source in the business while contributing less than a modest source producing smaller files the firm keeps whole and services itself. No report built from the loan amount column will ever show that, and the loan amount column is the one every origination system puts in front of you first, because it is the one the lender cares about.

The pipeline tracker, which in most firms is a spreadsheet maintained by whoever is most organised rather than a system anybody bought, already holds both figures. It has to, because the principal needs to know what is genuinely coming in rather than what was quoted. Exporting the retained fee instead of the headline fee is therefore a matter of choosing a column that already exists rather than building anything new, and it is what makes the resulting channel ranking reconcile to the firm's own revenue instead of to a deal announcement.