Mortgage Choice runs one of Australia's largest mortgage broking networks, with brokers operating their own businesses under a shared brand and shared guidelines. For over five years, Engaging.io was the technology partner behind their HubSpot ecosystem — building and evolving two custom portals, integrating the platforms their business already depended on, and staying constant through a period of significant organisational change.
The result was a CRM built specifically for how a franchise-style brokerage actually works: partitioned, validated, and ready to scale.
Mortgage Choice needed more than an out-of-the-box CRM. With thousands of independent brokers operating under one brand, a head office team managing those relationships, and a live data warehouse already doing heavy lifting behind the scenes, off-the-shelf HubSpot wasn't going to hold the structure this business needed.
With around 3,000 brokers running their own businesses under the Mortgage Choice umbrella, customer and loan data couldn't simply sit in one shared pool. Brokers needed to see their own clients and nothing else, while still operating inside a single, unified platform. Getting this wrong could cause a compliance and trust problem, not just a UX one.
Brokers needed a platform for marketing and client outreach. Mortgage Choice's own broker managers needed something else entirely: a way to track relationships, follow-ups, and broker performance, without brokers ever seeing that layer. A single generic portal couldn't serve both audiences without compromising one of them.
Because contact and deal records fed directly into Mortgage Choice's own data warehouse, accuracy couldn't be an afterthought, it had to be built in at the point of entry. Standard HubSpot fields are largely free text, which works for a lot of businesses but wasn't going to hold up here: a mistyped or inconsistent value at the very first step could break a downstream workflow or corrupt the format the data warehouse expected. Mortgage Choice needed fields structured and constrained from the start, not cleaned up after the fact.
Organisational change put pressure on institutional knowledge. Mortgage Choice was acquired by REA Group partway through the engagement, which brought new teams, new priorities, and regular staff turnover on the client side. Through it all, Engaging.io was frequently the party with the deepest institutional knowledge of how the platform actually worked — a role that needed a genuine long-term partner, not a vendor passing through.
Ownership and partitioning as the foundation.
Every contact and deal was governed by ownership rules, including primary and secondary broker assignments for customers who moved between brokers (for example, relocating between states). Timeline activity was partitioned so brokers could only see communication relevant to their own relationship with a customer, while marketing sends operated separately from that partitioning by design.
A custom CRM extension, not a stock record view.
Because HubSpot's default fields would let brokers enter anything, we rebuilt the contact and deal interfaces using a CRM extension inside an iframed window, adding validation before any record could save, protecting the format integrity the data warehouse required downstream.
Specialist integrations built where none existed.
We built a custom PropTrack integration as a CRM card, letting brokers generate a property valuation report, log it against the record, and send it directly from HubSpot. We also built a custom BirdEye integration to sync customer reviews back into the CRM (BirdEye has since released its own native HubSpot integration, a sign of where the market has caught up to what we'd already solved for).
A second portal, purpose-built for a different audience.
Mortgage Choice's broker managers got their own HubSpot portal, entirely separate from the broker-facing platform, with reporting and automation built on loan data — including alerts when a customer's fixed-rate term was approaching expiry, prompting proactive outreach to reduce churn.
Data warehouse connectivity that respected what already existed. Mortgage Choice already ran its own data lake on Google Cloud. Rather than duplicating that investment, we built the sync layer connecting it to HubSpot — architecture designed to work with the client's existing infrastructure rather than around it.
Mortgage Choice's brokers gained a single platform that could support thousands of independent businesses at once, without compromising the data separation their franchise model depended on. Ownership and partitioning rules meant customers moving between brokers, or between states, were handled cleanly, without duplicate comms or lost context.
The custom-validated CRM extension gave Mortgage Choice confidence in the data flowing into their own warehouse, closing a gap that standard HubSpot fields couldn't. On the head office side, the separate broker manager portal gave Mortgage Choice proactive, automated visibility into churn risk, surfacing fixed-rate rollovers before they became a reason for a customer to walk.
Perhaps the clearest measure of the platform's design: through an acquisition, significant staff turnover, and years of change, the system Engaging.io built kept working, and was ultimately robust and well-documented enough for Mortgage Choice to train and hand over to their own internal team. That's not a story about a vendor relationship ending. It's a growth partner doing its job well enough that the client could stand fully on their own two feet.
What made this relationship work was consistency through change. Mortgage Choice went through an acquisition and regular turnover on their side, and Engaging.io was often the only constant with real institutional knowledge of how the platform worked.
Rather than treating that as a dependency to protect, we treated it as a responsibility to plan our own way out of, investing in documentation and platform design that meant Mortgage Choice's team could eventually take full ownership. When Mortgage Choice was ready to build that capability in-house, we supported the training and handover of an internal team who now manage the platform day to day.
That's the measure of a genuine growth partner: not how long you stay, but whether the client is stronger and more self-sufficient for having worked with you.
A very productive and enjoyable experience integrating our Single Customer View cloud platform to HubSpot for group email distribution. Quick and creative ways of solving issues were primarily driven by the deep understanding of the HubSpot platform. An absolute pleasure to work with the Engaging team, and in particular Ralph Vugts, and we look forward to a long and productive relationship
Martin Corne
Senior Project Manager, Mortgage Choice
