A factual snapshot of the Australian mortgage broker trail book — book size, trail rate, retention, refinance velocity and clawback. Use it to size up your own performance, not as audited industry data.
Last refreshed Q2 2026 · sources listed in methodology below
Most aggregator panels cluster within a few basis points. Differences in headline rate matter less than differences in clawback rules and retention drift — that's where actual money moves.
These are the four metrics that tend to determine whether a trail book grows or shrinks year-on-year. None of them appear cleanly on a default aggregator dashboard — TrailScope was built around tracking exactly these.
On a typical $500k loan, that's about $750/yr of trail walking out the door. Most refinances cluster in the 3-month window after a fixed-rate roll-off — the single biggest retention pressure point in the book.
Most lenders run a 24-month clawback ladder — 100% in year one, 50% in year two. Aggregator dashboards show the clawback after it has happened; brokers running active retention programs cut this number roughly in half.
Five-year retention jumps from ~47% to ~61% when every active loan gets a documented annual review. The lift comes mostly from rate-renegotiation — most fixed-rate roll-offs are saved by a phone call before the customer goes shopping.
Median brokers carry the bulk of their income in a small number of large or multi-loan clients. A single refinance in the top decile can wipe out a whole month of marketing spend — which is why concentration risk is its own retention category, not a footnote.
The figures on this page are compiled from three sources: anonymised aggregate data from organisations using TrailScope, public reporting from MFAA Industry Intelligence Service and AFG Mortgage Index, and ASIC REP series filings on broker remuneration. Per-broker numbers are reported as medians, not means — averages get distorted by a small number of very large books.
Trail rates are stated as percent per annum of outstanding balance, regardless of how the lender pays them (most pay monthly at 1/12 of the annual rate). Retention is measured as the share of loans still active on a broker's book at a given anniversary, ignoring discharges that resulted from property sale rather than refinance.
No customer-identifiable information leaves a tenant's organisation. Aggregations are computed against pooled, hashed loan IDs — not against the customer-level records visible inside the workspace.
We're updating the benchmark each quarter as more brokerages plug in their data. Drop your email to get the PDF when the next edition lands — or skip the queue and get a personalised version for your own book.