I speak with a lot of lenders. Most of them call to tell me about their product, and almost all of them follow up with an email.

The emails are nearly identical. The same positioning. The same list of loan types. The same update on what settled this month. And they're all going to the same brokers.

Which means most of the private lending market is competing for the brokers who need it least.

Marketing by person

Private lenders mostly market one way. A BDM rings the brokers they know, sends the email, and waits for deals.

It's marketing by person. It only reaches the people already on the list, and every lender's list looks much the same. Same pond, same bait, same fish.

It works, up to a point. But it means the market is worked by relationship, not by opportunity. The deals go where the phone calls go, not where the need is.

The edges and the middle

The broker market splits three ways.

At one edge, a small group who are established in private lending. They know how to structure and package a deal, and they have plenty of lenders to choose from. Every lender is chasing them, so it's the most crowded part of the market.

At the other edge, a group who don't want to know. Some are winding down. Some see private lending as too much trouble. Chasing them is wasted effort.

In the middle, the majority. They're working, but they're not doing much in private lending. They don't have the lender connections, they're not sure how to structure a deal, and they don't really know where one fits. Many of them are highly motivated. What they lack is support and knowledge.

That shape isn't unique to private lending. It's the shape of almost every market. Everett Rogers mapped it in the 1960s in his work on how new ideas spread: a small group of early adopters at the front, a group of holdouts at the back, and the great majority in between.

Geoffrey Moore later showed, in Crossing the Chasm, why so many businesses stall at the front. The majority don't move for a pitch. They move when they have what Moore called the whole product: the support, the confidence and the practical help to act. Sell to the middle the way you sell to early adopters and nothing happens.

That's private lending's middle exactly. It isn't unwilling. It's unsupported. And it isn't on most lenders' radar at all.

The deals nobody counts

We talk to brokers every day, and one conversation comes up again and again.

A broker mentions a private lending enquiry from a few months back. A business owner needing short-term funds, or a property deal the bank wouldn't touch. We ask what happened to it.

"I told them we couldn't get it done."

Often, it could have been. These deals sat outside the banks but were exactly what private lenders look for. Listening to them, I can name lenders who would have funded them straight away. They never got the chance.

Those deals don't show up in anyone's numbers. A lender never sees a declined application or a lost deal. It simply never hears about it. Which is why a lender's biggest competitor usually isn't another lender. It's the enquiry that dies on a broker's desk.

Everyone loses when that happens. The borrower misses out on funding they could have had. The broker loses a deal that should have been in their pipeline. The lender never knows it existed.

The deals that do get through tell the same story from the other side. Talk to almost any credit team and you'll hear it: much of what comes through the door isn't aligned with what they fund, and isn't credit ready.

And if those brokers aren't on your radar, they're almost certainly not on your competitors' either. Nobody is calling them. Nobody is supporting them. That's fertile ground: the largest part of the market, largely untouched.

The problem isn't effort. It's structure.

Every lender sits in a lane, and often a narrow part of that lane. However good it is, it represents a small part of the overall funding picture. Where it actually fits depends on its credit parameters, and how those sit against every other lender's.

So it doesn't matter how a lender markets itself. Email, phone, a knock on the door: it's still one piece of the market, talking to brokers about one set of options. When every lender reaches out separately, the market doesn't get clearer. It gets more fragmented, and more confusing for the brokers on the receiving end.

The monthly settlement email is a good example. It tells a broker what the lender did. It doesn't help with what the broker is doing. That's an announcement, not support.

A thousand BDMs is still a thousand fragments

A lender can hire more BDMs and put more people on the phone. It can be done. It just doesn't make sense.

The issue isn't reach. It's relevance. Brokers in the middle don't have a deal every week, and a call only matters if it lands when they do. You can't be relevant to a deal you can't see coming, short of ringing that whole part of the market all of the time.

Even then, "Got anything for us?" isn't the whole product. A broker who isn't sure how to structure a deal needs support, and the support they need goes far beyond one lender, because the deals they see go far beyond what any one lender funds.

So even if every lender put on a thousand BDMs, it still wouldn't work. More calls don't fix fragmentation. They add to it.

Lender directories and indexes don't solve it either, however good they look. A list of lenders isn't support. It doesn't tell a broker where their deal fits, or how to get it there.

This has been solved before

Fragmented markets have a well-worn way out, and it's always the same one: aggregation.

Search. My background is in search and aggregation, and this pattern is familiar. The early web wasn't short of information. It was short of organisation. Every site did its own marketing, and people still couldn't find what they needed. It wasn't fixed by building a better website. It was fixed by a layer above all of them that organised the lot and matched each person to what they were looking for.

Home loans. Closer to home, Australian residential lending went through this a generation ago. Banks relied on their branches and their own people. Then aggregators gave brokers what they couldn't build alone: access to a panel of lenders, systems, training and support. Brokers went from a small share of home lending to writing around three in every four home loans today. Same country, same kind of problem, one lane over.

Travel. No hotel ever built a site where travellers compare every hotel. It couldn't, because the value is in seeing all of them at once. Hotels plugged into the booking platforms instead, and filled rooms they would never have reached on their own.

Private lending hasn't had that moment yet. The lenders are there. The deals are there. What's missing is the layer in between.

What the layer does

It aggregates the market. It brings every lender's credit parameters together into one current picture, and engages brokers across all of it. Because it covers the whole market, it's relevant whenever a deal comes up, whatever it is. And it can work one-to-one, at scale:

  • Identify the brokers in the middle, across the whole market, not just the names already on a list.
  • Reach out with something relevant to where they are.
  • Listen to what comes back: what they see, where they get stuck, what they've let go.
  • Build a profile of each broker over time, across every kind of lending, so you know where they sit.
  • Support them with what fits them, so the next enquiry doesn't get turned away.

That's the whole product Moore was describing. Do it well and you build loyalty. You become the broker's lifeline in an area where they'd otherwise be lost, and they start feeding opportunities into the pipeline instead of letting them go.

The same applies to accountants, lawyers and real estate agents, who see clients needing private lending all the time. They just need a different approach, because private lending fits differently into what each of them does.

Lenders don't need to build it. They need to plug into it.

No single lender can realistically build this. The technology, and the data capture, management and segmentation behind it, is significant. And a lender's business is lending, not running that kind of operation.

More to the point, no lender can be the whole answer, so no lender can have the whole conversation. Like the hotel and the booking platform, the layer only works because it sits above all of them.

The shift for a lender isn't to do more of the same marketing. It's to recognise that the market has to be aggregated, and to plug into that.

Where Private Lending Group fits

That's the framework we're building. Brokers and lenders come to us every day, and our work is bringing the two into alignment.

We're not here simply to get lenders more business. We're here to solve a problem that costs everyone: borrowers who miss out, brokers and advisers who can't get deals done, and lenders who never see the deals that suit them. Fix the alignment and it works for all three.

If your marketing still depends on who your BDMs already know, it's worth a conversation about the part of the market you're not seeing.