How Much Is My Trail Book Worth? (2026)

The short answer

A trail book is worth a multiple of the trail income it produces in a year. In Australian private sales reported through FY2024–25 that multiple clustered around 3×, with a working range of roughly 2.5× for books that need work and 3.5× for books that are young, diversified and reviewed. A book paying $6,000 a month in net trail, $72,000 a year, is therefore worth somewhere between $180,000 and $252,000 before any adjustments a buyer negotiates.

That is the headline. The rest of this guide is about the adjustments, because the difference between the bottom and the top of that range is a full year of trail, and most of what moves a book from one to the other is within the seller's control.

Start with the trail you actually receive

The first mistake in a self-valuation is using the wrong number. Lenders quote trail as a gross rate, typically 0.15% to 0.20% of the outstanding balance per year. Your aggregator takes its share before the money reaches you. A buyer will receive trail under their own aggregator agreement, so they value the net figure, and they will find the net figure in your RCTI regardless of what you quote.

Take the last twelve months of commission statements and add up the trail lines actually paid to you, GST exclusive. Do not annualise a single good month. If your trail has been rising because of new settlements, a buyer will still use the twelve-month figure and may ask for the trend by month. If it has been falling, they will ask why.

A quick sanity check: net trail divided by the outstanding balance of the book should land somewhere between 0.11% and 0.18%. Outside that range, either the balance is wrong or the split is unusual.

What moves the multiple

Buyers move the multiple for five reasons, and they ask for evidence of each.

Run-off. The single largest factor. A book losing under 10% of its balance a year is worth more per dollar of trail than one losing 25%, because the buyer is paying for years of income that will not arrive if clients leave. Twelve months of statements show run-off directly: loans present last September and absent this September, with their balances.

Seasoning and clawback exposure. Loans settled in the last 24 months carry an upfront commission that the lender can still recover. A buyer either deducts the recoverable amount from the price or holds it back until each loan clears its window. A book where 30% of loans settled in the last two years has a real liability attached; a book where most loans are three to seven years old does not, and its trail is also more stable.

Lender concentration. Half the book with one lender is a risk the buyer prices: one policy change, one rate move, one system migration that drops trail. A spread across six or more lenders reads as safer.

Arrears. Loans in arrears typically pay no trail and signal clients under pressure. Buyers strip them from annualised trail and discount if the arrears rate is above the market's.

Data quality. A seller who can produce a reconciled schedule of every loan, its lender, settlement date, balance and last twelve months of trail, and whose numbers tie to the aggregator's statements, gets a faster sale and a higher price. A seller who hands over a folder of PDFs gets a discount for the buyer's uncertainty.

A worked valuation

Suppose the book earns $6,000 a month net, $72,000 a year. Balance is $48m across 190 loans and nine lenders. Run-off by balance over the last twelve months was 12%. Fourteen loans settled in the last 24 months, with $38,000 of upfront still inside a clawback window. Two loans are in arrears.

Annualised trail after removing the arrears loans: about $71,000. Run-off at 12% and a reasonable lender spread justify a multiple at or slightly above 3×, call it 3.1×. That gives $220,000. The buyer will then want the $38,000 clawback exposure handled: either a price reduction, or, more commonly, $38,000 held back and released as each loan passes its window. Realistic outcome: $180,000 at settlement, up to $220,000 over the following two years, less any clawbacks that actually occur.

What a buyer will ask for

Expect requests for twelve to forty-eight months of RCTIs, a loan-level schedule, your aggregator agreement, evidence of lender accreditations, the age profile of the book, run-off calculated by balance and by count, and the list of loans inside their clawback window with dates. Buyers financed by a specialist trail lender such as Broker Capital will also need the lender's own due diligence, which tends to be stricter on arrears and concentration.

The aggregator is a gating item. Trail is paid under your agreement, so the buyer must either be accredited with the same aggregator or the lenders must agree to re-paper the trail. Some do, some do not, and the ones that do not can leave part of the book unsaleable. Establish this before listing.

Raising the number before you sell

Everything above points the same way. Twelve months before a sale, start reviewing the book monthly against the commission file: contact clients with fixed rates expiring, reprice loans whose rates have drifted, call clients in arrears, and reconcile every statement so the data pack is ready. Run-off falls, arrears fall, and the valuation rises on both the trail and the multiple.

It is also the reason to value the book every year even if you never intend to sell. The multiple is a scorecard for retention, and it moves faster than most brokers expect. And if the reason for valuing the book is to raise capital rather than to sell it, a trail book loan works from the same numbers: lenders in that market, Broker Capital among them, advertise advances of around 1.5× annual trail and discount for run-off and clawback exposure exactly as a buyer would.