Just released: 2026 Third-Party Lending Report: Residential Lending

Agile Market Intelligence tracks broker experience and sentiment with lenders they’ve worked with in the past year. The report reveals detailed broker assessments across five categories: Personnel, Products, Speed, Support, and Technology, identifying lender strengths, shortfalls, and trends in the residential lending industry. The Third-Party Lending Report enables a better understanding of the perceived level of broker support by various parts of their proposition and tracks changes year-on-year. 

Now in its 17th year, the 2026 Third-Party Lending Report: Residential Lending surveyed 1,261 mortgage, finance, and commercial brokers to evaluate the performance of lenders they have worked with in the past 12 months. Each lender was then rated across 16 attributes spanning five categories.

Key findings

• The top factor in choosing a lender to recommend is product policy, with 93% of brokers identifying it as an important deciding factor.
  
  
• Macquarie has the highest broker usage at 70% in the past 12 months, topping this area for the second year in a row.
  
  
• More brokers are diversifying beyond residential mortgages. The percentage of residential brokers that wrote business loans grew from 26% to 29%, while SMSF intent rose from 28% to 32%.

Market and Category Leaders

Two types of recognition are given to lenders in the Third-Party Lending Report. The Market Leader seal recognises the highest-rated lender within each lending segment. On the other hand, the Category Leader seal recognises the top three lenders for outstanding performance within the five categories: products, support, speed, technology, and personnel. 

For the Market Leaders, the winners per segment are as follows:

• Major banks: Westpac
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• Non-major bank (Large): Macquarie Bank
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• Non-major bank (Small): P&N Bank
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• Non-banks (Large): Pepper Money
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• Non-banks (Small): MA Money
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• Mutual banks: P&N Bank

As for the category winners, Macquarie Bank topped all five categories. The remaining second and third spots are occupied by Bankwest and a diverse set of lenders, which can be found below:

Lender strengths and weaknesses

• BDM quality and product policy are the lending market’s leading strengths.
  
  
• Credit assessment and product pricing are the market’s weaknesses.
  
  
• Technology ratings have improved, while speed ratings declined.

Overall, product policy is the leading driver for broker recommendations. Over 90% of brokers also rank credit assessment, turnaround times, and product pricing as highly important factors. 

This year, speed ratings declined from 79% in 2025 to 73% in 2026. This is an important area for lenders to improve upon, as 89% of brokers report speed as the second most important decision driver, just behind product policy (89.7%).

On the other hand, technology ratings have improved this year overall due to higher scores in broker portals, digital tools, and application lodgment. While all lender categories have improved their technology ratings, the overall average broker satisfaction of 78% was led by large banks, which recorded the highest rating of 81%, making technology a clear differentiator for the segment.

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About the report

Broker Pulse’s Third-Party Lending Report is an annual review of Australia’s residential mortgage lenders in the past 12 months as evaluated by over 1,200 residential mortgage brokers. Survey responses were collected between 17 February and 30 April 2026.

You can download the report here.

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