Katy Perry’s Guide to Home Lending

You change your mind
Like a girl changes clothes…

‘Cause you’re hot then you’re cold
You’re yes then you’re no
You’re in then you’re out
You’re up then you’re down
You’re wrong when it’s right
It’s black and it’s white

My 10-year old daughter loves Katy Perry.  Her music is not really my cup-of-tea, but as I had her blaring away at home last night I realised that she can pretty succinctly summarise the confusion that borrowers are facing at the moment.

This week, Australia’s largest credit union simultaneously made it easier and harder to get a loan.

Credit Union Australia (CUA) will now no longer lend on smaller apartments in high-density developments.  At the same time CUA has relaxed its lending standards for owner-occupiers buying established properties.

These changes follow Westpac and St George relaxing their lending standards to investors.  Investors can now borrow up to 90 per cent of the value of a property; a relaxation from 80 per cent.

For borrowers, it really is confusing out there, recently Suncorp announced a very aggressive investor rate, after shunning the investor market for some time.

So, if you are looking to buy, how do you find out where you stand?

The answer of course is find a broker who knows what is going on.  The latter part of this sentence is the most important part – any broker can tell you that they are accredited with lots of lenders.  But you really need to be sure that, whichever broker you select that s/he monitors the changes in bank policy on a daily basis.

Katy Perry spent a record-breaking 69 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 100.  Consistent is what you need when choosing a broker.

None of this hot-and-cold business when it comes to knowing what the banks are up to.