The 120/90/60/30 Renewal Cadence: What Each Touch Is Actually For
Four touches, each with a different job. The mistake is sending the same message four times.
Most brokerages that run renewal outreach at all run something close to a 120/90/60/30 cadence — a first contact around four months out, then progressively more direct conversations as maturity approaches.
The structure is sound. Where it usually goes wrong is that all four touches carry the same message, differing only in urgency. A borrower who receives four escalating versions of "your renewal is coming up" learns to ignore the first three.
Each touch should do a different job.
Before the cadence: what this is and is not
Worth being precise, because these get conflated.
An operating convention. The 120/90/60/30 rhythm is a working practice, not a regulation. Nothing requires a brokerage to contact a borrower on that schedule.
A lender's notice obligation is separate. Lenders have their own requirements to notify borrowers ahead of maturity, and those vary by jurisdiction, regulator and product. They are not what this cadence is about, and a brokerage should not describe its own outreach schedule as though it were a compliance requirement.
Consent governs the channel. Whether you may contact a past borrower electronically depends on the consent you hold and the rules in your jurisdiction. That is a genuine constraint on this process, and an empty consent field is not permission — treat absence of evidence as absence of consent.
Industry commentary broadly favours early engagement. Canadian Mortgage Professional has described brokers working 120–150 days out from maturity, with some making a soft touch around six months and becoming more deliberate near four months out. Use that as a reference point rather than a rule.
The four touches at a glance
| Window | Job | Channel | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~120 days | Establish that you are handling it | Email is fine | Can be automated |
| ~90 days | Give them something to compare against | Email or call | Automated with human review |
| ~60 days | Have the actual conversation | Call | Human, always |
| ~30 days | Close, or find out you have lost | Call | Human, senior if large |
The pattern: automation carries the early, low-stakes touches; humans carry everything from 60 days in.
~120 days — establish presence
The job: make sure the borrower knows their renewal is coming and that you are on it — before their lender's letter arrives.
This is the cheapest touch and the highest leverage, because it changes what the lender's letter means. A borrower who has heard nothing from you in three years reads that letter as their only option. A borrower who heard from you last month reads it as one of two.
What it should say: their term is approaching, the date, that you will be in touch with options closer to the time, and that they need not do anything yet.
What it should not do: quote a rate. It is too early to be meaningful, and a number you cannot honour in four months is worse than no number.
Safe to automate. It is informational, low-risk, and identical for most borrowers.
~90 days — give them a comparison
The job: move from "we exist" to "here is what the market looks like."
By now the borrower may have received something from their lender. This touch gives them something to hold it against.
What it should include: the current market picture in general terms, what their options broadly are — stay, switch, refinance — and an invitation to talk properly.
What it should not be: a rate sheet blast. A borrower who wanted to shop on rate alone would have gone to a comparison site.
This is the touch that most benefits from segmentation. A borrower with a large balance or a changed situation should get a call here rather than an email. Automation can produce the list and draft the message; a human should decide which ones to lift out.
~60 days — the actual conversation
The job: a two-way conversation about what they are going to do.
This is the touch that decides most renewals, and the one most often skipped when the week gets busy. Everything before it was setup.
Why 60 and not later: a switch to a new lender takes time — application, approval, documents, legal work. At 60 days there is room. At 30 there may not be, and a borrower who wants to move but discovers it is tight will often stay put by default. That default is the loss.
What to establish: whether their situation has changed, whether they are considering moving lenders, what their lender has offered, and what would make them stay or go.
Never automate this one. If a brokerage automates a single touch it should not be this one, and if it can only manage one human touch in the whole cadence, this is it.
~30 days — close or learn
The job: convert, or find out you have lost and understand why.
If they have not decided: this is the last point where switching is comfortably achievable. Be direct about the timeline.
If they have already signed with their lender: that is worth knowing precisely. Ask what decided it. A brokerage that collects those answers for a year has a far better picture of its own failure modes than any general advice can offer — and it is one of the few sources of genuinely proprietary insight available to a brokerage.
Larger balances warrant the most senior person available.
What to do about borrowers between windows
The cadence assumes borrowers arrive at each window in turn. In practice you will start this process with borrowers already at 45 days, or 110, or past maturity.
Rules that keep it sane:
- Enter them at the nearest window they qualify for, not the earliest.
- A borrower inside 60 days gets a call, whatever else they missed. Do not send a 120-day introduction to someone maturing in seven weeks.
- Past maturity is not lost. A borrower who signed a renewal with their lender has a new term, and a new maturity date. Record it and they re-enter the cadence.
The suppression rule
One rule protects everything above: a borrower who asks to be left alone must actually be left alone.
That requires a field, and every outbound step must check it. This tends to be the first thing an ad-hoc process gets wrong, because suppression is invisible until it is violated — and by then you have emailed someone who asked you twice not to.
The same applies to consent. If a borrower's consent is missing or withdrawn, they should still appear on the list, flagged as "cannot contact electronically" rather than dropped. Dropping them silently means nobody ever fixes the record.
Why the intervals are roughly 30 days apart
The spacing does more work than the exact numbers.
Thirty days is far enough apart that a borrower does not feel chased, and close enough that you stay present through the window in which they decide. The specific figures matter less than the interval — a brokerage running 130/100/70/40 would be fine. One running four touches inside the last six weeks would not.
This also has a practical consequence for how the list is produced: because windows are about 30 days apart and most brokerages review weekly, a borrower sits inside the same window across several consecutive reviews. Without a record of the last touch, they receive the same message repeatedly. That is why last contact date is not optional bookkeeping — it is what keeps the cadence from becoming a nuisance.
Building the weekly list covers how that record turns into a workable routine.