From the Team at Claremont

Melbourne and Sydney clearance rates slipped to around 51 to 52 per cent last weekend, just days before Tuesday's expected rate rise. Here is what that means for first home buyers, upgraders and investors.

A softer market changes your refinancing options even if you're not selling. Here's what a lower valuation does to your LVR, your LMI and your usable equity.

Saving a deposit is the hardest part of buying a first home, and for a lot of people it's the only part standing between them and the market. A guarantor home loan is one of the ways around it. Instead of waiting years to save a 20% deposit, you borrow against a family member's equity to get in sooner. It's a genuinely useful tool, but it also puts someone else's home on the line, so it pays to understand exactly how it works before anyone signs anything. Here's the full pict

You've found the next place. It's right, it's available now, and your current home hasn't even hit the market yet. This is the classic upgrader's problem: the timing rarely lines up, and nobody wants to lose the home they actually want while they wait for their own to sell. Bridging finance is built for exactly this gap. It's a short term loan that lets you buy the new property before the old one sells, then tidies itself up once the sale goes through. It's a useful bit of ki

Buying property inside your self-managed super fund is one of those strategies people hear about at a barbecue and start googling that night. It can be genuinely powerful, especially for business owners, but it's also one of the most rules-heavy corners of lending, and the mistakes are expensive. Before we get into how the lending works, one thing needs saying plainly. Whether an SMSF purchase actually suits you is a financial advice decision, and we're brokers, not financial

Inflation cooled in the June quarter, and it's changed the mood ahead of the Reserve Bank's next move. After three rate rises this year, borrowers finally got a number that leans the right way. That's not the same as an all-clear though, so it's worth understanding what actually happened. Here's what the figures said, why the market has swung around to expecting a hold on 11 August, and what it means for you if you've got a mortgage or you're about to take one on. (This is wh

Plenty of people buy their first investment property without saving a separate cash deposit. Instead, they use the equity that's built up in their home. It's one of the most common ways Australians get into property investment — and one of the most commonly fumbled, because the mechanics are genuinely fiddly and there's one structuring decision that can quietly cost you flexibility for years. Let's walk through how it actually works, with real numbers, and where the traps sit

Nobody plans for this one. When a relationship ends, the house is usually the biggest asset in the mix and the hardest thing to untangle. There's a mortgage attached to it, both names are on the title, and suddenly you're trying to make clear-headed financial decisions at the worst possible time to be making them. We work with clients going through this fairly regularly, and the same questions come up every time. Can I keep the house? What does it cost to buy out my ex? Will

A first home buyer client we settled last month had been to four auctions before she got us involved. At the first one, she bid up to $880,000 based on a $900,000 pre-approval letter she'd received from her bank in January. She won the auction, signed the contract, and then her bank came back during formal approval and told her the loan couldn't proceed at that amount. The contract was unconditional (no finance clause, common at auction). She lost her 10% deposit, faced poten

If you've been scrolling property news this week you've probably seen the headline. Morgan Stanley is forecasting Australian house prices could fall between 5% and 10%, which would be the largest decline in four decades. Reuters picked it up on Tuesday. Pretty much every Australian finance outlet has run a version of it since. We've had a few clients flag it with us already. Some are worried about negative equity. Some are wondering whether to delay a purchase. A few investor

We sat down with a client last month to do an annual review on his loan. Variable rate, 25 years left, $620,000 balance. He'd had an offset account attached to his loan since settlement in 2022 and assumed it was working. When we asked what his average offset balance was, he wasn't sure. He had a quick look on his banking app and found out he'd been holding about $4,000 in there because most of his savings sat in a separate high-interest account at a different bank. That $4,0

Last Thursday night, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor used his budget reply to commit the Coalition to repealing Labor's negative gearing and capital gains tax changes if they win the next election. For property investors who spent the last week wrapping their heads around what the budget actually meant, this adds a second question to the mix: what if it gets reversed before it starts? We've had a few of these conversations with clients this week, and the honest answer is that

If you've been reading the property news this week, you've probably seen variations of the same headline. Melbourne prices are falling. Sydney prices are falling. The cycle has turned. The market is rolling over. All of that is true. None of it tells you whether the suburb you're actually looking in is doing what the headline says. We've spent the last fortnight running numbers for Melbourne clients across the spectrum. Inner-east upgraders, first home buyers in the outer nor

We had a call last week from a client we settled in late 2023. Decent income, two properties, never missed a repayment. He'd seen the sharper rates being advertised, called his bank for a pricing review, got a token discount, and figured he'd refinance. Three weeks later the new lender came back with a "decline on serviceability". Same income, same properties, same clean credit file. The number just didn't work anymore. That's mortgage prison. And in 2026, with three RBA hike

A client walked into our office last week with a pre-approval number from January. By May, the same lender was offering her around $48,000 less on the same income. Nothing about her situation had changed. The numbers around her had. If you've applied for a home loan recently, or you're about to, borrowing capacity is probably the figure you're most focused on. It's also one of the least understood. Most people assume it's a function of their income and the property price. It'

The "should we build instead?" conversation has picked up at Claremont over the last few months. Established home prices in Melbourne have softened in some pockets, vacant land remains accessible in growth corridors, and for buyers who want a brand new home built to their specifications, the maths can stack up in interesting ways. It can also go badly wrong. Construction lending is structurally different to a standard home loan, the current environment carries real risks that

The RBA Board voted 8 to 1 yesterday to lift the cash rate by 25 basis points to 4.35%. It's the third consecutive hike of 2026 and brings the rate to its highest level since late 2011. The decision was widely anticipated (30 of 33 economists surveyed had forecast a hike) but the more important detail is what came in the accompanying statement and forecasts. For variable rate borrowers, the practical effect lands within days. Here's what was actually decided, what the RBA is

There's a particular conversation we have over and over at Claremont. A self employed client, often someone running a successful business turning over solid revenue, sits down expecting the home loan process to be straightforward. Their business is profitable. Their accountant is happy. The bank account looks healthy. And yet the borrowing capacity number that comes back from their bank feels half what they expected, and the application takes twice as long. The frustration is

The MFAA released its quarterly data recently and the headline number is worth pausing on. In the December 2025 quarter, mortgage brokers wrote 76.7% of all new residential home loans in Australia. That's the highest December quarter market share on record, and it's a meaningful jump from the 70% mark brokers crossed only a few years ago. Three in four Australians taking out a new home loan went through a broker rather than direct to a bank. That's a striking number, and it's

There's a particular conversation we have a lot at Claremont. A small business owner has been paying rent on their warehouse, office or retail space for years, the lease is up for renewal, and someone (usually their accountant) has mentioned they could buy the building through their self managed super fund instead. Suddenly the rent they're already paying could be flowing into their own retirement savings rather than a landlord's pocket. It's a strategy that genuinely works f