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A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
The trail book is priced as the annuity it is. The upfront commission is priced as the work it takes to earn again next year.
A broking business in Melbourne is valued on the recurring commission it will keep earning: trail on the loan book or renewals on the insurance book, capitalised after a market salary for the principal. Upfront commission on new lending is assessed on its own and at a higher risk loading, because nothing about it is guaranteed to repeat.
The usual triggers are a sale of the book to another brokerage or a fellow aggregator member, admitting a second broker as a partner or buying one out, handing the business to an employed broker as the principal steps back, a property settlement in the Melbourne registry of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, a lender taking security over the trail, and an ATO requirement for market value when the book moves from a sole trader into a company or trust.
Plenty of Melbourne books still change hands on a headline multiple of annual trail agreed between two brokers in a Glen Waverley office, with nobody asking how old the loans are, how many came through one builder or one accountant, or how much clawback is still outstanding. A certified valuation replaces that shorthand with a figure the valuer will defend, and tells both sides what is actually being bought: an income stream with a measurable rate of decay rather than a flat annuity.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
The Income Approach leads. Trail and renewal commission arrives every month whether or not the broker writes another loan, which is why buyers price it as recurring income and why the valuer capitalises the earnings it produces.
The usual method is capitalisation of future maintainable earnings, applied to the recurring income once the principal has been paid a market salary for the broking and management work they actually do. The capitalisation rate then carries loadings for the things that make one book riskier than another: the run-off rate, how much of the book came through a handful of referrers, the age and refinancing profile of the loans, and the terms of the aggregator or authorised representative agreement. A Box Hill brokerage with a ten-year-old book spread across hundreds of households is a different risk from a two-year-old book in Point Cook written almost entirely off one builder's referrals.
A discounted cash flow suits a book whose run-off is known, because it can lay the decay of the existing trail against the new business expected each year. Where the principal is retiring or the book is maturing, that decay is the whole question, and a single capitalised year would hide it.
Book sales expressed as a multiple of recurring commission are what buyers and sellers quote to each other, so the report always shows that result. It is tested against the earnings result rather than adopted on its own, because a multiple says nothing about the age or concentration of the book behind it.
Rarely decisive. The book itself is the business, and the income and market results already capture it. Fit-out, computers and vehicles are immaterial in almost every brokerage.
Normalisation is where two valuers most often part company, so every adjustment is listed in the report with its reason instead of sitting unexplained in a schedule. For a broking business the recurring ones are:
Melbourne brokerages sit in a few distinct places, and where a book was written tells the valuer something about it. The CBD and Southbank hold the larger commercial and corporate brokerages. Box Hill and Glen Waverley hold established residential and insurance practices with older, diversified books. The growth corridors around Werribee, Point Cook, Cranbourne and Pakenham hold younger books built on first home buyer and construction lending, often fed by builder and developer referrals. The corridor book usually shows faster run-off and a heavier clawback history; the eastern suburban book usually shows the opposite. Neither is better in itself, but the valuation has to read the book it is given rather than a citywide average.
Because aggregators, lenders and insurers operate nationally, the comparable transactions are national too, and the Melbourne market mostly changes the risk loading rather than the method. A book with a large share of its lending on one estate in Mickleham or Clyde carries a concentration risk that a book spread across Bayside and the inner east does not, and the capitalisation rate says so. Licensing under ASIC and membership of the MFAA or FBAA are national as well, so a Melbourne buyer looks past the postcode to the book's data.
The national count of financial and insurance services businesses grew 4.3 per cent in 2025 to 2026, and Victoria added a net 19,581 actively trading businesses over the same year (Source: ABS, Counts of Australian Businesses, July 2022 to June 2026, released 18 August 2026). More businesses means more borrowers and insureds for a broker to serve, but also more brokers competing for them, so the report treats that growth as a retention question rather than a growth assumption. The risk-free rate in the discount rate build-up is taken from Australian Government bond yields published by the RBA (Source: RBA, Statistical Tables F2 Capital Market Yields), and the same rate environment drives refinancing across a Melbourne loan book.
The report opens with the purpose of the engagement, the standard of value, the valuation date and the information relied on, together with its limits. It then walks through each approach considered, the method chosen under each, every normalisation adjustment and the reason for it, and finally reconciles the results into a range, explaining the weighting in plain words rather than leaving a formula to speak for itself.
That written reconciliation is most of what makes an opinion hold up. If a report cannot say why the income result was preferred to the market multiple, or why the capitalisation rate landed where it did, it will not survive a second expert, whether in the Commercial Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria or across a negotiating table. Our reports are prepared consistently with APESB, APES 225 Valuation Services and signed by a credentialed certified valuer who will explain and defend the opinion.
Which assumption in this report would a reviewing expert attack first, and what is your answer? If the valuer cannot say, the work is not finished.
An Indicative valuation suits a broker who wants to know what the book is worth before a conversation with a buyer or an aggregator. It is for internal decision-making and is not written for third party reliance. A Summary report is the usual choice for a book sale, admitting or buying out a partner, or a lender taking security over the trail. A Detailed report is needed for a family law settlement, a shareholder dispute or any matter another expert will review.
The purpose decides the depth. The greater the chance that a court, a lender, the ATO or an opposing expert will read the opinion, the more of the working the report needs to show.
For internal decision-making. Useful for testing an offer, setting an expectation before a negotiation, or deciding whether to go to market. It is not written for third party reliance.
Sets out the approaches applied, the normalisation adjustments made and the reasoning behind the conclusion. The usual choice for a sale, an ownership change or a finance application.
Applies and reconciles all relevant approaches in full. The level required where a court, the ATO, a lender or another expert will review the opinion.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.