your partner for growth
Marketing for mortgage brokers & protection advisors
House of Marque is a marketing partner for mortgage brokers and protection advisers across the UK. We build marketing that reduces dependence on a small number of referral sources, works within financial promotion rules, and keeps you present between transactions.
Your pipeline has a single point of failure
Around 91% of UK mortgage business is expected to go through intermediaries this year, up from 87% in 2024. That is the good news and the problem in one number. Borrowers have decided they want a broker. They have not decided they want you, and increasingly your competition is not the lender’s own channel. It is the broker in the next town who is easier to find.
Most brokers get most of their business from a handful of relationships. Two or three estate agents, an accountant, a developer, a solicitor who passes work across.
It works, right up until it does not. The branch manager who liked you moves on. The agency is sold and the new owner has an in-house broker. The developer signs a panel agreement. None of that is your fault and none of it is within your control, and when it happens the pipeline goes with it.
The brokers who survive that are the ones who were already visible to people who had never met them. Not instead of the referral relationships. Alongside them.
That takes consistent marketing, and consistent marketing is the thing that stops the week you get busy. Which is exactly the week it matters most.
Where does the majority of business actually come from?
Over 60% from one place
What this means
One relationship is your business. If it changes hands you have months, not years.
what to do first
Build direct enquiry channels now, while the referrals are still healthy
40-60% from one place
What this means
Concentrated but survivable. A loss would hurt for two quarters.
what to do first
Second and third referral services, plus a database programme.
20-40% from one place
What this means
Healthy spread. The risk is complacency.
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what to do first
Visibility, so growth stops depending on someone else's goodwill.
20% from one place - MOSTLY DIRECT
What this means
You have built something durable.
what to do first
Protect it. Consistency is now the only threat.
Most brokers we speak to are in the top two rows and have never written the number down.
Compliance is not the reason you cannot market
This is the objection we hear first and it is usually the wrong one.
Financial promotion rules govern what you can say and how you must say it. They require your marketing to be fair, clear and not misleading, to balance benefit with risk, and to be signed off appropriately depending on how you are authorised. They do not stop you being visible, being useful, or being the person a first-time buyer already trusts before they enquire.
What the rules do stop is lazy marketing. You cannot promise the cheapest rate. You cannot imply certainty you do not have. You cannot pull a testimonial into an ad without thinking about it.
Almost none of that touches the marketing that actually works for brokers, which is being findable, being clear, and being genuinely useful to somebody eighteen months before they need you.
We build marketing that goes through your compliance process rather than around it, and we expect it to be checked. Your network or compliance officer has the final word on every promotion, and that is how it should be.
"What we actually do"
We find out where you actually stand
Every relationship starts with a Marketing Audit and Health Check. Where you appear when somebody searches, what your referral concentration looks like, whether your database is working, what you are spending, and what your compliance exposure is in the marketing you already run.
We build a pipeline that is not one relationship deep
Direct enquiry channels that work alongside your referral sources rather than replacing them. Local visibility, content that answers what borrowers actually ask, and a database that stays warm through the five years between one mortgage and the next.
We do it with you, or we do it for you
Some advisers want a plan and someone to check their work. Some want the whole thing run. Most sit between, and it changes as the firm grows.
What that covers
Being found by people who have never met you.
Local search, your Google Business Profile, and the questions borrowers type before they know who to ask.
Staying present between transactions.
The gap between a mortgage and a remortgage is years long. Most brokers go quiet for the whole of it, then wonder why the client used a comparison site.
Protection, marketed before the appointment.
Protection does not fail in the meeting. It fails because nobody had thought about it before they walked in. Content that raises it early changes the conversation you get to have.
A personal brand, because clients choose the person.
Nobody picks a limited company to talk to about their mortgage. They pick you.
First-time buyer content that builds trust early.
They are eighteen months out, reading everything, and forming a view about who is straight with them.
Reviews and reputation, handled within the rules.
One firm per postcode sector
We take one client per postcode sector across every sector we work in. Once your area is taken we will not work with a broker competing for the same clients.
For financial services that matters more than it does elsewhere, because your market is genuinely local and genuinely referral-driven. A supplier working for you and for the firm across town is working against one of you.
Who builds it
One of us spent a decade running marketing inside a national property network, working alongside the mortgage and protection arm, and across the legislation that governs what property and financial services businesses are allowed to say. The other spent six years on the front line of estate agency sales, which is where most broker referrals come from and where most of them are won or lost.
We understand the relationship between an agent and a broker from both sides of it. That is unusual in a marketing supplier and it shows up in the work.
Adam
Lucy
What does marketing for a mortgage broker cost?
What you should be investing. It depends on your case target, your average procuration and protection income per case, and how much of next year already exists in your pipeline. Marketing spend for a broker is usually a smaller absolute number than for an estate agency, because the geography is looser and the channels are cheaper, but consistency matters more. Our marketing spend calculator gives you a starting figure from your own numbers in about four minutes.
What we charge. The Marketing Audit and Health Check is £495 plus VAT, credited in full against your first month if you go retained within 90 days. Retainers are priced by scope and by the size of the firm, and we do not publish rates, because a number quoted before we understand your position is either too high or too low and both waste your time.