Home Loans & Mortgages

Don’t buy a new home as your first home.
If you were buying a home 10 years ago, this would not make sense. But things are different today. Land prices are killing new home sales and only people that have made equity in the first home can build new today.

So my first advice to you is to buy a bargain established home. There are plenty to choose from and they are below replacement cost. You get more for less, and in less time.

After all Westpac has pulled itself from near bankruptcy in the early nineties to be a contender Australia’s biggest bank. Mainly at the cost of its mortgage holders, during the Global Financial Crisis, and the “Banana smoothie” scandal. [Free publicity is good publicity, and who doesn't like a banana smoothie Gail, right?] So there’s a missed branding opportunity. “The Banana Smoothie Bank”. [smoothie in more ways than one it would seem]

Adelaide Bank’s shared equity home loan The Adelaide Bank is the first bank in Australia to launch a shared-equity home loan which could make property ownership easier, but analysts warn it could boost house prices. The Shared Equity Mortgage [Equity Finance Mortgage] is a home loan product that allows home owners to borrow as little [...]

Mortgage loan exit fees [really deferred establishment fees by another name] have become a way on chaining homeowners to their bank loans.

Melbourne Australia’s Liberman family has entered the fledgling shared equity home loan business through a $25 million investment in an unlisted fund recently launched by Macquarie Bank-affiliated Rismark International. Its LJCB Investment Group has bought into the first of several planned Equity mortgage funds from which Rismark hopes to corner the shared equity home loan market. [...]

Construction loans have fallen steeply over the past 9 months, inline with new home sales. Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] show that the number of new homes being constructed fell by 5.3 per cent in the fourth quarter, 4 times worse than economists were expecting. Single dwelling new homes were hit hardest. So it was felt as lower construction loans with mortgage brokers and banks everywhere.