Web design for mortgage brokers and agents.

Read the enquiries that reach a mortgage brokerage and almost none of them start with a number.

They start with a circumstance. The income is self-employed and two years of notices of assessment do not look like what the lender wants. They landed in Canada fourteen months ago. A consumer proposal finished last year. The renewal letter arrived and the figure on it is a shock. They are buying out a spouse. The deal is a rental and the bank asked a question they could not answer.

That is the real market, and it is almost the opposite of what most broker websites are built to serve. The usual site leads with a rate table, a stock photograph of a couple holding keys and a calculator, which addresses a rate shopper who was never going to call anyway.

The rate table is a liability with a maintenance schedule

Rates move. The table on your website does not, unless somebody makes it their job, and nobody ever does after the first month.

Three things follow from a stale number. The first conversation with every new enquiry starts with you explaining why the figure on your own site is not available. Your credibility takes the hit on the call where you had the least of it to spend. And advertising a rate is a regulated act, which means an out of date number is not only awkward, it is the kind of thing a regulator takes an interest in.

If you publish rates anyway, publish them properly. The date and time they were checked. Whether they are insured, insurable or uninsured, because those are different markets and quoting the insured number to somebody with thirty percent down is misleading even when it is accidental. Term, amortization assumption, whether it is available to everyone or to a qualifying subset. Who the lender is, if you are allowed to say.

The better page for most brokerages is the one underneath the number. How pricing is actually arrived at, why two people with the same credit score get different offers, what a lender is paying attention to, and what the difference between the lowest advertised rate and the right mortgage tends to cost when it goes wrong. That page ages well. A table does not.

One more thing worth saying out loud. You are not going to outrank the rate comparison sites for rate terms. Ratehub, RateSpy and the rest of that category have the links, the data and the budget, and every hour spent fighting them is an hour not spent on the searches you can win.

The search is situational

Here is where the business is, and it maps cleanly onto pages.

• Self-employed, incorporated, or paying yourself in dividends. What two years of filings need to show, what a lender does with retained earnings, and what the alternative lending route costs when the file does not fit.
• New to Canada, on a work permit, or with no Canadian credit history yet. Which programs exist, what counts as a credit reference, how long people usually need to wait, what the down payment expectation looks like.
• A renewal arriving in the next six months.
• Credit that has taken damage. A proposal, a discharge, collections, a missed stretch during an illness. What is possible, when, and at what price.
• Separation and a spousal buyout, which has its own mechanics and its own urgency.
• Rental and investment purchases, including the small multi unit files banks handle awkwardly.
• Construction and renovation draws, which almost nobody writes about and which generate well qualified enquiries.
• Refinancing to consolidate debt, which is the search most often made at midnight and the one most in need of honest writing.
• Second mortgages and private lending, where the honest page explains the cost and the exit rather than selling the product.

Each of those is a page in the client's own words, carrying what the lender actually looks at, what documents to start collecting, roughly how long it takes and what the common reason for a decline is. That is search work of an entirely unglamorous kind, aimed at a field where the competition is still publishing one page headed Mortgage Products.

Write about the qualifying rate while you are there, because it is the single most common surprise. Federally regulated lenders test a borrower at a rate higher than the one on the contract, so the payment somebody can afford and the payment they qualify for are not the same number. Provincially regulated credit unions are not bound by that federal guideline in the same way, which is a genuine piece of professional knowledge and exactly the sort of thing worth a paragraph on your site.

The renewal letter is the best page nobody writes

A renewal letter is a commercial event with a fixed date on it, and the path of least resistance is to sign it and send it back.

The person holding that letter is in market, has a deadline, is not shopping aggressively and is largely unrepresented. A page written for them specifically, explaining what the offered rate usually means, what a switch involves, what it costs, how long it takes, what a blend and extend is and when staying put is genuinely the right answer, is the highest value thing on most broker websites and it is missing from nearly all of them.

Write the version that sometimes tells them to sign. It converts better than the version that never does.

Calculators, and what they are for

Calculators earn their place. Payment, affordability, land transfer costs, insurance premium, penalty estimates, rent against buy. People use them, link to them and come back to them.

Two mistakes to avoid.

Do not hold the result hostage. A calculator that demands an email before it shows a number produces junk addresses and sends the visitor to the next site. Show the answer, then offer what a tool cannot do: a view on whether a lender will actually accept this file, which is the only question that matters and the only one you are uniquely able to answer.

And do not hard code the rules. Down payment thresholds, the price ceiling for an insured mortgage and the maximum amortization have all moved in recent years. A calculator built on last year's assumptions keeps producing confident answers that are now wrong, and nobody notices until a client quotes it back. Build them so the inputs are editable by you, and diarize a review.

The application is not the call to action

A full application is half an hour of somebody's evening and it asks for a social insurance number. Nobody who found you four minutes ago is going to start one.

So the button is not Apply Now. The button is a fifteen minute call, a short pre-qualifying conversation, or a document checklist they can start gathering against. Put a calendar link on it, because a broker who answers in the evening wins files from banks that do not, and a booked slot beats a voicemail.

Behind that, your origination and client systems carry the real work: the platforms your brokerage runs on for submissions and secure document collection, and whatever you use to follow up. The website's job ends at the handover. Make the handover obvious, branded and quick, rather than an unexplained jump to a login page on a domain the client has never heard of.

Forms that touch money

A website form collecting financial detail is a different object from a website form collecting a name.

Ontario has no general private sector privacy statute of its own, so the federal privacy law applies to personal information you collect in the course of commercial activity. The practical consequences are mostly plumbing.

• Keep the public form to a name, a way to reach them, and a sentence describing the situation. Nothing else.
• Say on the form, in a line above the button, not to include account numbers, a social insurance number or document attachments, and put the secure upload route right next to that sentence.
• Switch off storing submissions in the website database. If something has to be emailed, email a notification that an enquiry arrived rather than its contents.
• Keep advertising and analytics tags off any page that carries financial detail, and check what your session recording tool captures if you run one.
• Write the privacy page like a person. Who sees the information, how long it is kept, which lenders it may go to and with what consent. In a sector built on trust, the privacy page is a sales asset and almost everybody treats it as boilerplate.

Identification, and getting the compliance half right

This is the part to handle carefully, and the honest position is that your principal broker signs it off, not your web designer.

Mortgage brokerages, brokers and agents in Ontario are licensed by the provincial financial services regulator under the province's mortgage brokering legislation, and that legislation and its regulations govern advertising in real detail. In general terms, your brokerage has to be identified by the name on its licence, the brokerage licence number has to appear, and an individual's advertising is tied to the brokerage they are licensed through. There are also rules about what you may call yourself and about disclosure to borrowers, on prescribed forms and at set points in a transaction.

Ontario also licenses mortgage agents at more than one level, with dealing in mortgages from private and other non-designated lenders restricted to the higher class. That matters on a website, because a team page or a service page can easily imply something an individual is not licensed to do.

Build the identification into the templates rather than hand placing it, so it cannot be dropped from a new page added in eighteen months. Then have the footer, the biography template, the team page and any landing page reviewed by whoever holds compliance in your brokerage, and confirm the current requirements against the regulator's own guidance rather than against any web page, this one included.

Advertising has its own layer. Meta classifies credit advertising as a special category, which strips out much of the targeting a campaign would otherwise use, so a paid campaign in this sector needs to be planned around that rather than discovering it at launch. Check the current policy before anybody budgets for an audience that may not be available.

Trust, on a page rather than in a slogan

Somebody about to send you their income documents is making a judgement about a stranger in roughly forty seconds.

Put a real photograph of the actual person on the page, not a model at a desk. Use their name, their licence class and their brokerage. Say where they are, since a lot of this business is still local even when it does not have to be. Say which lenders you work with to the extent your agreements allow, because the breadth is the whole argument for using a broker instead of walking into a branch. Explain how you are paid, including the cases where the borrower pays a fee, because that question is in the back of every client's head and answering it unprompted is disarming.

Reviews belong here too, kept specific and kept within the rules on what may be claimed. A review describing a self-employed file that three banks declined is worth more than twenty that say the process was smooth.

Why no brokerage is named here

Brokerages sit among the clients behind us, and not one of them appears here. In a regulated industry an agency relationship is not something every compliance department wants used as somebody else's advertising, which is a reasonable position and theirs to take.

So the sector knowledge above is the thing to judge. For build quality, the work page shows what we ship in other industries on the same engineering, and how to pick a web designer is the list we would want you holding before any money changes hands.

What this costs

A build starts at $5,000, and on this one the money goes somewhere unusual.

It is not the design and it is not the code. It is the writing. Twelve situational pages that are accurate about lender behaviour, readable by a worried person at eleven at night and clean enough to survive a compliance read is the bulk of the project, and it cannot be done from a brief. It takes interviews with whoever actually places the files. Budget for that honestly or the site ends up as another brochure with a calculator bolted on.

The build is 1.5 to 3.5 weeks of work. The schedule is set by your review cycle rather than ours, because every page touching a product, a rate or a licence needs an internal sign off, and a brokerage with a careful compliance lead should plan for that rather than be surprised by it. We would rather you were slow there than fast.

What a website costs has the numbers if you want them before a conversation. Otherwise tell us which three client situations you want more of and we will tell you what the site would have to say to get them.