June 20, 2026
What Your Credit Score Actually Affects When You Apply for a Home Loan
Your credit score does not just determine whether a lender approves your home loan application. It influences which lenders will consider your file, the interest rate on offer at lenders who use risk-based pricing, and in some cases how much you can borrow. Most Australians do not check their score until they are already mid-application, […]
June 18, 2026
How Long Does It Take to Buy Your First Home in Australia?
Most first home buyers set aside 3 months for the whole process. The reality is often 6 to 12. Pre-approval, house hunting, legal due diligence, and settlement each carry their own timelines, and any one can slow the others down. Understanding what actually happens at each stage helps you plan more accurately and respond more […]
June 15, 2026
Principal and Interest vs Interest-Only: What Changes Over Time
Many property investors choose interest-only loans for the cash flow advantage without fully understanding what happens to the loan balance over time. The monthly repayment is lower, which is accurate. What the repayment schedule doesn’t make obvious is that the loan balance stays exactly where it started until the interest-only period ends, at which point […]
Broker Notes #7
Broker Notes – 13 June 2026
NAB became the third major bank this week to declare that Australia’s cash rate has peaked at 4.35 per cent, and that the next move, when it comes, will be a cut. The announcement landed just days before the RBA’s June 16 meeting, adding new urgency to a question every mortgage holder is asking right […]
June 13, 2026
What Lenders Actually Assess When You Apply to Refinance
Refinancing looks straightforward on the surface. Find a lower rate, submit an application, let the new lender take over the debt. In practice, the lender you’re refinancing to assesses you almost as if you were a first-time borrower. A clean repayment history with your current bank carries some weight, but your current financial position is […]
June 11, 2026
Fixed Rate vs Variable Rate: How to Decide on Your Home Loan
At the end of 2023, roughly 35% of Australian mortgage holders were on fixed rates, most of them locked in when rates were at record lows around 2% in 2021. As those fixed terms expired across 2023 and 2024, hundreds of thousands of borrowers rolled onto variable rates between 2 and 3 percentage points higher […]
June 7, 2026
What Lenders Mean by Genuine Savings and How to Prove It
Genuine savings is one of the most misunderstood requirements in the home loan process. Many borrowers discover that the $50,000 sitting in their account doesn’t qualify, not because the money isn’t there, but because of where it came from or how recently it arrived. What genuine savings actually means to a lender Australian lenders use […]
Broker Notes #6
Broker Notes – 6 June 2026
Every major Australian lender has now rewritten how it assesses investor loans – and for borrowers buying an established property after 12 May 2026, that means borrowing capacity is down 20 to 30 per cent, with no change to income or interest rates. The federal budget’s negative gearing overhaul has moved from a policy announcement […]
June 5, 2026
How to Structure Loans Across Multiple Investment Properties
The way you structure loans across multiple investment properties can determine whether your portfolio grows or stalls. Get it wrong early and you may find yourself locked into a setup that limits future borrowing, complicates your tax position, and gives lenders far more control over your assets than you would ever choose. Why loan structure […]