Broker economics: what 20 hours of packaging per file actually costs
A commission-only broker's time has a price. We put numbers on it using published fee ranges and typical close rates.
The arithmetic
A broker closing 25% of mandates at an average $24,000 fee earns $6,000 of expected value per signed mandate. At 20 hours of packaging per file, that is $300 per hour of expected value, before any of the deals that die from document fatigue are counted.
Cut packaging to 2 hours and lift the close rate to 40% through faster, cleaner submissions, and expected value per mandate rises to $9,600 at $4,800 per hour. The capacity freed is where the real upside sits: the same broker can carry roughly twice the mandates.
Where the time goes
In interviews with brokers, the three largest time sinks are re-typing tax returns into spreads, reconstructing debt schedules from statements, and completing Form 413 for multiple guarantors. All three are extraction problems, not judgment problems.