Home Loans & Mortgages

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia [CBA] has just dropped the home loan rate on its recently introduced ”no fee” home loan offer to 7.11% in response to other major players offering deep discounts in order to attract home buyers and mortgage refinance customers in a slow mortgage market.

In any event the ANZ and National Australia Bank [NAB] have already scrapped mortgage exit fees, while Westpac Banking Group chief executive Gail Kelly told a Senate committee into banking competition in January that a ban was “not an overly big deal”. But was she telling the truth?
Because on theWeeend she was , saying that that’s a poor policy response by the Government.

Westpac chief executive, Gail Kelly is not happy with Government plans to ensure that all Australians are free to move their mortgages, and has hit out at moves by the federal government to ban exit fees on home loans from July this year.
She claims that the forced abolition of the mortgage exit fees would in fact make it harder for smaller lenders to compete in the home loan market, without explaining why, and why she should care about Westpac’s competitors in the first place!

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