I still sit in those meetings. And the most valuable thing I do in them was never the number — it's the conversation around it.
Over the last five years I've helped clients secure more than $217 million in home-loan approvals — purchases, refinances and investment lending. Before that, I was the one a broker relied on to run his entire business — no other support staff, just me — across more than $424 million in lending. Somewhere north of $600 million in transactions, and the same lesson sat inside every one of them: the number is never the point. The conversation around it is.
For years I'd reach for a calculator mid-conversation and find the same thing every time: a generic figure that ignored what my client actually cared about — their goals, their structure, the next move they were dreaming about. The tools the aggregators hand us, and the ones floating around online, are built to produce a number. They're not built to help a broker have a better conversation. So instead of deepening the moment, they interrupted it.
I wanted something real. Tools that start where my client actually is, model their situation honestly, and give them something worth talking about — so the conversation goes somewhere, and so they remember why they came to a broker in the first place.
The longer I did this, the clearer it got: brokers are quietly bleeding from two wounds — and no tool on the market was built to stop either.
The dead "contact us" form
We spend money driving people to our websites — and greet them with a form that asks for commitment before giving a thing. But people aren't ready to talk yet; they just want to know how much can I borrow, what are the repayments, should I refinance. So they bounce to a bank's calculator, get their number, and we never even knew they were there.
Run-off and clawback
You do the hard yards, settle the loan, earn the commission — and not long after, they refinance with someone they met at a barbecue. The lender claws the upfront straight back. The trail stops. The relationship you spent years building evaporates — usually because we went quiet after settlement, with no reason to call and nothing of value to call with.
So I built LSbroker
Not to sell calculators — to fix both wounds at once. Branded calculators that hand a prospect real answers up front, so the people who reach out arrive warm, with intent, already trusting your numbers. And strategy and review tools that give you a reason to call every client, every year, with something they genuinely want — so you stop being a transaction they forget and become the adviser they'd never leave.
Everything in it comes from a real broking conversation I'd had and wished I could have done better. It's built on proper lending maths — daily-interest engines, real stamp duty and LMI, usable-equity milestones — but always in service of the conversation, never instead of it. Because that's the part that actually wins and keeps clients.
And here's the thing: since 2021, we brokers carry a legal Best Interests Duty the banks' own channels simply don't. The least our tools can do is live up to it — genuinely start from the client's situation and serve their interest, not just spit out a number.