The mortgage broker's guide to wills and estate planning referrals

Ask any estate planner what prompts people to make a will and the same answers come back: buying a home, taking on a mortgage, having children. Mortgage brokers sit at the intersection of all three. A significant share of UK adults have no will at all, and the proportion is highest among exactly the demographic taking out first mortgages — couples in their late twenties to forties, often with young children, who have just taken on the largest debt of their lives.

The broker has already gathered the facts that make the conversation natural: the ownership structure, the dependants, the life cover, the new liability. One question — do you have a will that reflects this purchase? — is all it takes. The answer, more often than not, is no. What happens next determines whether that moment creates value for your practice or evaporates.

You do not need to become an estate planner. You need to recognise a handful of triggers that are already visible in your fact-find:

• Joint purchases — clients rarely understand the difference between joint tenants and tenants in common, and the choice has real estate-planning consequences.
• First child, or one on the way — guardianship is the conversation that finally gets young parents to act.
• Blended families — second marriages, stepchildren and children from previous relationships are where dying intestate causes the most damage.
• Unmarried couples — many still assume a common-law partner inherits automatically. In England and Wales, they do not.
• Older borrowers and larger estates — where lasting powers of attorney and inheritance planning belong on the table.

Each of these is a sentence in a conversation you are already having. None requires you to give advice — only to notice, and to have somewhere credible to send the client.

Three reasons, usually. First, wills feel off-patch — not a regulated mortgage activity, so brokers hesitate to raise them. Second, most brokers have no reliable destination: recommending one local firm on reputation alone feels like a personal risk with no upside. Third, there has been no mechanism to be paid, so the prompt stays a favour that slips down the priority list on a busy completion day.

The result is a strange asymmetry. The professional best placed to trigger the will conversation earns nothing from it, while the client either drifts to an online search or never gets round to it at all. Estate planning is one of the clearest cases where a structured referral serves the client and the broker at the same time.

Through SmartPeer, the mechanics are deliberately light-touch. You raise the topic at completion or review, and if the client is interested you create the referral. From there:

• The client opts in online before any contact — every referral is consent-based, so nothing happens without their explicit agreement.
• The introduction goes to carefully selected specialists in wills and estate planning — you are not vouching personally for an unvetted local firm.
• A disclosure letter is generated automatically, telling the client how the referral works and that you may receive a fee.
• You follow the case in live tracking from introduction to completion, and commission statements reconcile against what you see.

Total additional work for you: one conversation and a few minutes at a screen. The client gets their affairs in order at the moment it matters most.

Will-writing itself is not a regulated activity in most of the UK, but that is a reason for more care in choosing where clients end up, not less. Referring into a network of vetted firms and carefully selected specialists is a stronger position than an ad-hoc recommendation, and written disclosure of any fee is good practice regardless of regulatory status. Where estate planning shades into regulated financial advice — trusts alongside investments, inheritance tax planning — the receiving firm must hold the right permissions, which is exactly what vetting is for.

Your own position is simple: check your regulatory permissions, disclose to your client, and let SmartPeer's process handle the paperwork. Joining is free with no monthly fees, and members keep 60–70% of introducer fees. For most brokers, wills are the easiest referral line to start with — the need is near-universal, the conversation is natural, and the client thanks you for raising it.