The file types that consume the most broker hours, and why they're worth pricing differently.

A straightforward salaried purchase at a large mortgage amount can move through a single lender in a handful of touches. A modest refinance with two applicants, one self-employed and one on parental leave, a rental property in the mix, and a private mortgage to discharge can consume several times the hours — on a much smaller deal. Size correlates loosely with complexity, but it's not the driver.

Treating every file as roughly equal effort because it's “just another deal” is exactly what causes capacity to get misallocated — a broker or team ends up surprised by how much time a small file actually took, after the fact, instead of anticipating it.

Every applicant, income source, and property involved in a deal is an independent thread that has to be verified, documented, and kept current until closing. A single applicant with one income source and one property is one thread. Two co-applicants, each with a different income type, plus an existing rental property being carried, is five or six threads running in parallel — each capable of generating its own condition, its own document request, and its own timing risk.

• →Multiple applicants with different income types (one salaried, one self-employed, one on leave)
• →An existing property being sold, refinanced, or carried alongside the new one
• →Multiple income sources for a single applicant (base plus rental, or base plus a side business)
• →A blended or restructured deal involving more than one mortgage or lien

Some of the highest-hour files aren't complex because of the borrower at all — they're complex because they depend on a chain of external parties who each operate on their own timeline: an appraiser, a mortgage insurer, a second lender in a blended deal, a lawyer resolving a title issue, or an employer slow to confirm an employment letter. Every external dependency is a point where the file's progress leaves the broker's control, which turns into hours spent following up rather than hours spent producing anything new.

A file with several external dependencies stacked on top of each other — new construction with an appraisal contingency, an insured deal, and a same-day close — can consume disproportionate broker time purely in coordination, independent of how straightforward the borrower's own documentation is.

It does, and it's worth naming as its own factor alongside moving parts and external dependencies. Two files with identical structural complexity can still cost very different amounts of broker time depending on how quickly and completely the borrower responds to a document request — a client who sends exactly what's asked for the first time costs far fewer hours than one who needs three follow-ups to produce the same document.

This is why intake should include a candid read of how organized and responsive a client is likely to be, not just the facts of their income and property — it's a genuine, if less discussed, driver of the hours a file will consume.

A short intake scan against the two drivers above — count the moving parts, count the external dependencies — gives a rough but useful read on a file's likely hour cost before a single document is collected. A file that scores high on both is a strong candidate for extra structure from day one: an earlier document request, a dedicated point of contact, or routing to a team member (or partner) with more bandwidth for the coordination load specifically.

This is the practical basis for a delegation or outsourcing decision, covered in more depth in our piece on the math behind broker capacity — knowing which files are structurally expensive is what makes that math meaningful rather than a guess.