Focus on refinances and renewals, not the purchase market, urges broker

Amid a cooling housing market, it's perhaps no surprise that Nova Scotia's mortgage renewal wave is creating far more business for mortgage brokers than the purchase side – and both borrowers and brokers are benefiting from a growing array of lender options in the province.

That's according to David Clarke (pictured top), owner of Clarke Mortgage Group, who told Canadian Mortgage Professional the lending landscape is no longer dominated by banking giants and the smallest local institutions.

That expanding middle ground now includes credit unions, monoline lenders and alternative options that give brokers considerably more room to shop around on a client's behalf than they had even a few years ago.

It’s also translated into more opportunities in parts of the province that historically had fewer options.

"There's a lot more business in rural areas that we just never had," Clarke said. "There's a lot of options for refinancing, and I find a lot of people in these rural markets go right from the banks to the [other best-known lenders] and there's a lot of stuff in between they don't quite know about."

Is the industry too hung up on purchases?

Clarke argued the broker channel as a whole remains overly weighted toward purchase business and realtor relationships, even as renewal and refinance activity has grown over the past year and a half. Much of that comes down to habit, he suggested, with marketing budgets and referral networks still built around realtor relationships and purchase transactions rather than the renewal side of the business.

That's the wrong approach, he said – and one that's not in tune with where the real opportunity currently lies. "I think that we as a broker channel want to focus on something," he said. "There's way more people with mortgages up for renewal that need to refinance than there are people buying homes in Nova Scotia.

"I think we're very focused as an industry on purchases, talking to realtors and stuff, but there's this whole other lane."

The scale of that renewal wave is a national story that's been grabbing headlines for years. Renewal inquiries accounted for more than half of all mortgage inquiries tracked by Ratehub.ca in 2026, up from 40% during the same period in 2025, while purchase inquiries dipped from 46% to 36% over the same stretch – even as early evidence suggests many borrowers renewing in 2026 have proven more resilient than initially feared.

The rise of alternative lending has been a significant trend across Canada's housing and mortgage markets in recent years, driven in part by declining affordability and the increasing inability of Canadians to qualify for mortgages with leading banks.

Borrowers with more complex income situations are looking beyond those major lenders for renewal and refinance options, a pattern Clarke said is also emerging among his own Nova Scotia client base.

That's a similar dynamic to the one that's driven credit unions to expand their own first-time buyer offerings in the province in recent months, even if Clarke said those measures have seen little uptake among his clients.

Turning refinance conversations into new business

For Clarke, the appeal of the renewal and refinance side of the business lies largely in how unaware many clients are of what's actually available to them. Rather than assuming borrowers know their options once a renewal notice lands, he said brokers who take the time to walk clients through the current lending landscape are often opening their eyes to possibilities they didn't know existed.

That gap, he added, is exactly where brokers can add the most value – and where there's room to grow a book of business well beyond the purchase transactions that still dominate much of the industry's attention and marketing efforts.

On the renewal and refinance side, Clarke said education is crucial for borrowers, especially those who didn’t yet realize the degree of choice at their disposal. “I think clients in some cases just simply don’t know that the options exist,” he said. “So it’s a really fun conversation.”

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