From the Team at Claremont

Victoria's new rule means buyers get the seller's reserve price a week before auction. Here's what the change means in practice and why your finance should be ready first.

Lenders have repriced fixed and variable rates well beyond the Reserve Bank's September move. Here is what actually happened and how to weigh up fixed versus variable from here.

Two more lenders now offer the Help to Buy shared equity scheme, but Commonwealth Bank still doesn't offer it through brokers. Here is how the scheme works and what the changes mean for you.

House approvals just hit a five year high while apartment and townhouse approvals fell sharply. Here is what that split means if you are buying, building or investing.

The national auction clearance rate has slipped to a three month low and unsold stock is piling up. Here is what that actually means if you are the one house hunting.

The RBA's latest Financial Stability Review looked at whether Australian mortgage holders can handle falling home values. Here is what it found about arrears, savings buffers and negative equity.

National home values have fallen for a sixth straight month, with Sydney and Melbourne leading the declines. Here is what the slowdown actually means if you are buying, selling or already own a home.

The Reserve Bank raised the cash rate to 4.60 per cent on Tuesday, its fourth hike this year. Here is what it actually means for your repayments and your borrowing power.

Capital city prices are falling faster than regional ones right now, but the longer term numbers tell a more complicated story. Here is what the gap actually means if you are deciding where to buy.

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