The 26 award categories explained: which one should you enter?
Twenty-six categories, ten of them built for specialists. Here is an honest read on each one — who it suits, when to enter, and when you are better off putting your energy somewhere else.
Start here: the shortest possible answer
Pick the category where your best evidence lives. Not the one with the grandest title, and not the one you think you have the best chance of sneaking. The judging weights written entries at 45% and verified performance data at 25%, so a category you can prove beats a category you can only claim.
For most brokers that means one of two things. If your book is broad and your numbers are strong, go for a marquee award. If your reputation is built on one kind of client — expats, self-employed, medicos, construction — go for the specialist niche. The niche is not the consolation prize. It is where a great broker with a 60-loan year can beat a generalist with 300.
How many should you enter? Two or three. One marquee, one or two niches. Entry is free, so there is no cost to breadth — but every entry needs its own written submission and its own evidence, and a thin entry hurts more than a missing one.
Realistically, budget three to four hours per entry to do it properly.
One thing to know before you choose
Any category that attracts fewer than five entries is either merged into a neighbouring category or not awarded at all this cycle. That safeguard exists so nobody wins a trophy by default — it protects the value of every mark we hand out. It also means a very narrow category is a slightly bigger gamble than a broad one. Choose the niche that genuinely describes you, not the narrowest one you can find.
Full detail on scoring is on the How Judging Works page: 45% written entry, 25% verified performance data, 20% normalised customer reviews, 10% judge discretion.
All twenty-six, one by one
Marquee & Performance
The headline honours. Broad books, hard numbers, the most crowded fields.
Broker of the Year
Who it’s for The best all-round individual broker in the country — volume, client outcomes, conduct and standing, all at once.
Enter if You can evidence a strong settlement year and genuine client results, and you are comfortable being measured against the biggest names in the industry.
Skip if Your real strength is one client type. You will almost certainly place higher in Group II, and a niche win carries more marketing weight than a marquee near-miss.
Brokerage of the Year — Boutique (1–5)
Who it’s for Businesses of one to five people, principal included.
Enter if You are judging the business, not yourself — team, systems, client experience, growth. Sole operators with a support person belong here.
Skip if You have no team story to tell and it is really just you. Enter Broker of the Year instead.
Brokerage of the Year — Medium (6–20)
Who it’s for Six to twenty people. The hardest stage in broking — past the founder bottleneck, not yet a machine.
Enter if You can show how you scaled without the service dropping. Retention, process and culture evidence matters as much as volume here.
Skip if Your headcount sits on a boundary and flatters you upward. Judges check, and a size mismatch reads badly.
Brokerage of the Year — Large (20+)
Who it’s for Twenty-plus people. Groups, franchises and multi-office operations.
Enter if You can evidence consistency across the business — not one star performer carrying an average firm.
Skip if Your growth has come by acquisition and the integration story is still messy. That question will get asked.
Young Broker of the Year
Who it’s for Brokers early in life as well as early in career. The age cut-off is stated on the entry form.
Enter if You qualify on age and have real results already. This is one of the least contested marquee categories most years — genuinely worth your time.
Skip if You are young but only months into the industry. Rising Star fits you better.
Rising Star / Newcomer of the Year
Who it’s for Brokers in their first stretch in the industry, at any age. Career changers count.
Enter if Your trajectory is the story. Judges here weigh momentum and craft over raw volume, which is exactly the point — nobody expects a 200-loan year in year one.
Skip if You have been writing loans for years. Entering down a level is transparent and it does not land well.
Customer Service Excellence
Who it’s for Brokers and businesses whose reputation is the product.
Enter if Your public reviews are strong, numerous and recent. The 20% review component bites hardest in this category — it is where independent evidence does the most work for you.
Skip if You have a handful of reviews. Fix that first; this one is winnable next cycle.
Signature Specialist Niches
Ten categories no other Australian program runs. If you have built a name in one lane, this is your section.
Best Expat Broker
Who it’s for Brokers who finance Australians living overseas buying back home — foreign-currency income, time zones, offshore documents, lenders who keep changing their minds.
Enter if Expat lending is a deliberate specialty with a real client base behind it. Show lender breadth and the deals nobody else could place.
Skip if You have done a handful of expat loans opportunistically. This field will be full of people who do nothing else.
Best Non-Resident / Foreign-Income Broker
Who it’s for The harder cousin of the expat category — foreign citizens, FIRB, non-resident policy, genuinely restricted lender panels.
Enter if You navigate FIRB and non-resident policy as routine work and can evidence approvals others declined.
Skip if Your clients are Australian citizens abroad. That is category 08, and the distinction matters to judges.
Best Self-Employed / Small Business Broker
Who it’s for Brokers who read financials properly — add-backs, trusts, alt-doc and low-doc, one-year-ABN cases, seasonal income.
Enter if You can walk a judge through a structurally difficult approval and show the reasoning. This is one of the strongest fields, and one of the most respected wins.
Skip if Self-employed clients are simply part of your mix rather than your craft.
Best First Home Buyer Broker
Who it’s for Brokers who do the patient, unglamorous work — schemes and guarantees, deposit strategy, education, hand-holding through a first purchase.
Enter if You can show volume and care. Reviews carry real weight here because first home buyers write the most honest ones you will ever get.
Skip if You treat first home buyers as low-value files. It shows in the evidence.
Best Broker for Medico & Healthcare
Who it’s for Doctors, dentists, vets, specialists and allied health — LMI waivers, registrar and locum income, practice purchases.
Enter if Medico policy is a genuine specialisation and you have the referral relationships to prove it.
Skip if You have written a few LMI-waiver loans. The winner here will have a practice built entirely on it.
Best Property Investor / Portfolio Broker
Who it’s for Multi-property clients — servicing strategy, lender sequencing, structure, debt recycling, keeping a portfolio moving when servicing tightens.
Enter if You can show long-term client portfolios you have built over years, not single investment purchases.
Skip if Your investor work is one-off purchases. Judges look for the strategy, not the transaction.
Best Broker for Guarantor & Low-Deposit Buyers
Who it’s for Family guarantee structures, LMI strategy, and getting people in years earlier than they thought possible.
Enter if You handle the family conversation as carefully as the loan structure — these deals carry real risk for the guarantor and judges will look for how you manage it.
Skip if This overlaps almost entirely with your first home buyer work. Pick one and enter it well.
Best Specialist / Non-Conforming Broker
Who it’s for Credit-impaired clients, discharged bankrupts, ATO debt, non-bank and private lending, and the exit plan back to prime.
Enter if You can evidence outcomes and an exit strategy — the strongest entries here show clients refinanced out of specialist product, not parked in it.
Skip if You cannot show what happened to the client twelve months later.
Best Construction & Knockdown-Rebuild Broker
Who it’s for Progress draws, builder liaison, cost-overrun rescues, and the patience construction lending demands.
Enter if You can show files you carried through build delays and variations without the client losing the loan. Recent years have given everyone material here.
Skip if Construction is an occasional file type rather than a deliberate specialty.
Best Refinance Broker
Who it’s for Repricing, retention, restructures and hardship exits — the work that saves clients real money without churning them.
Enter if You can quantify the savings you delivered. This is the most measurable category on the list, and the strongest entries lean hard on numbers.
Skip if Your refinance volume comes from cashback chasing. Judges will ask about client outcomes twelve months on.
Product Specialist
Mastery of a lending class. Usually the least crowded fields on the list — and the easiest to overlook.
Commercial Finance Broker of the Year
Who it’s for Commercial property, lease doc, development and the deals that never fit a template.
Enter if Commercial is the majority of your book. One good commercial file in a residential year is not an entry.
Skip if Your commercial work is really business lending. Category 20 fits better.
Asset & Equipment Finance Broker of the Year
Who it’s for Vehicles, plant, equipment and fleet — high volume, tight margins, unglamorous and genuinely skilled work.
Enter if You run asset finance as a real business line. Volume evidence is straightforward here, which plays well against the 25% data weighting.
Skip if You refer asset finance out. Refer the person who writes it instead.
Business Lending & Cashflow Broker of the Year
Who it’s for Working capital, invoice and trade finance, overdrafts, cashflow rescues.
Enter if You can show a business that survived because you got funding in place quickly. This category rewards speed and judgement more than size.
Skip if Your business lending is incidental to a residential book.
Best SMSF & Business Real Property Broker
Who it’s for Limited recourse borrowing, SMSF purchases, and business owners buying their own premises.
Enter if You work comfortably alongside accountants and advisers and can show compliant, well-structured outcomes.
Skip if You have done one or two. This is the narrowest category on the list — worth remembering it is also subject to the five-entry safeguard.
Values & Community
Beyond the numbers. These are judged on substance and evidence, not sentiment.
Innovation & Technology Award
Who it’s for Brokers and businesses who built or adopted something that measurably changed how they work.
Enter if You can show the before and the after — time saved, approval rates, client experience. Numbers, not a tech stack list.
Skip if Your entry would amount to naming the CRM you bought.
Community & Social Impact Award
Who it’s for Work that went well beyond writing loans — financial literacy, hardship support, community programs, pro bono help.
Enter if It is sustained and verifiable. Judges look for years, not a single fundraiser.
Skip if The work is genuinely private and you would rather it stayed that way. That is a fair call and nobody will think less of it.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award
Who it’s for Businesses that changed who gets hired, promoted and served — including brokers serving communities the majors underserve.
Enter if You can evidence outcomes: who is in the business now who was not before, or who got finance who could not get it elsewhere.
Skip if You have a policy document but no change to point at.
Regional Broker of the Year
Who it’s for Brokers outside the capitals — thinner lender presence, valuation headaches, rural and lifestyle security, and clients who have known you for twenty years.
Enter if You are regionally based and can show what that actually demands. Strongly recommend pairing this with a niche entry in Group II.
Skip if You are metro-based with some regional clients.
Marketing & Brand Campaign of the Year
Who it’s for A specific campaign — not a general brand. Content, community, referral programs, anything with a start, an end and a result.
Enter if You can attribute leads, enquiry or settlements to the campaign. This is judged on the campaign, so a small operator with a sharp idea can beat a big marketing budget.
Skip if You cannot isolate the result from everything else you were doing.
Still not sure? Three quick tests
- The referral test. When another broker sends you a file they cannot place, what kind of file is it? That is your niche category.
- The evidence test. Open your CRM and count. If you cannot find eight to ten strong examples in a category, it is probably not your category this year.
- The sentence test. If you cannot finish “I am the broker people come to when…” in one clean sentence, enter a marquee category and let your numbers speak.
And if you are genuinely torn between two, enter both. It is free, and the judging is done category by category — entering twice does not dilute either entry.
Pick your category. Then tell us your story.
Free to enter, always. Shortlist announced 28 October, winners 25 November 2026.
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