The morning portal round
A case handler starts the day by working through the pipeline. Case one is with a high street lender: log in, find the case, valuation instructed, nothing new. Case two is with a building society: different portal, different password, a note from underwriting asking for a further bank statement, posted yesterday afternoon. Case three: the lender emailed an update to the broker, who is on holiday.
By mid-morning they have checked twenty cases across a dozen lenders and updated the CRM by hand. Then a client calls to ask about case twenty-one, and the round starts again.
Why case status is so scattered
Each lender runs its own intermediary portal, and each shows status in its own way. Some send email notifications, some do not, some send them to whoever submitted the case. There is no common feed that tells a brokerage, in one place, where all its cases are.
The CRM holds the case, but only knows what someone types in. So the brokerage's view of its own pipeline is always slightly behind reality, and the gap is filled with portal rounds and phone calls.
- Every lender has its own portal and login.
- Status notifications go to individual brokers' inboxes.
- Underwriter queries sit in portal message areas until someone looks.
- The CRM is updated by hand after each check.
- Cases with no news look the same as cases progressing normally.
The result is that a brokerage can have a query sitting unanswered for a day or two simply because nobody happened to open that portal, while the client assumes everything is moving.
What the portal round costs
| Milestone | How it is found today | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Valuation instructed or booked | Portal check | Client not told about access arrangements |
| Valuation received | Portal check or email | Down valuation found late |
| Underwriter query | Portal message | Query waits until someone logs in |
| Offer issued | Email or portal | Conveyancer and client not told promptly |
| Case stalled | Only by noticing nothing has happened | Found when the client complains |
Case handler time is the obvious cost. The bigger one is delay: a query answered a day late can push a case back by more than a day, because it rejoins the underwriter's queue. In a chain with a completion date, that matters to everyone.
The case tracker we build
- Each submitted case is recorded in the tracker from your CRM, such as Acre, with lender, case reference, broker and key dates.
- Lender notification emails, from every broker's inbox or a shared address, are read and matched to the right case automatically.
- Where a lender offers a permitted data route for intermediaries, we collect status from it directly. Where it does not, we do not log in with staff passwords to scrape screens.
- Milestones such as valuation instructed, valuation received, query raised and offer issued are written to the case with dates.
- The right person is alerted when a milestone lands, with queries marked as urgent.
- Cases with no recorded movement for longer than your chosen period appear on a stalled list, prompting a portal check or call.
- Clients and, if you want, estate agents and conveyancers receive a short update at chosen milestones.
A pipeline you can actually see
The case handler starts the day with a list of what changed overnight and which cases need a look, instead of a full portal round. Queries are picked up the day they are raised. Brokers see the status of their own cases without asking. And when a client calls, whoever answers can tell them where things stand.
Owners get a clearer view too: how long cases typically sit at each stage with each lender, which is useful when brokers are setting clients' expectations.
Does this describe your pipeline?
- Someone logs into lender portals every day to check cases.
- Lender emails go to individual brokers' inboxes.
- Underwriter queries are found a day or two after they were raised.
- The CRM is often behind the real case status.
- You find stalled cases when the client or agent chases.