Weekly Wrap - Friday 30th July
**Please note: this was written prior to the recent SEQ lockdowns.
Please stay safe everyone 💙
Thank you for an incredible financial year!
We reached the end of the financial year, and would like to take the opportunity to say a massive thank you. Firstly, to our staff: we've lodged almost 400 deals in 12 months, that's over one a day. And for a small team going through the turbulence of what was the last 12 months, to pull that off is nothing short of amazing. So, a huge shout out to the team that's helping us across all of our offices.
We’d also like to thank our referrers, business partners, everyone that's worked with and supported us over the last 12 months. We are super excited about working with you guys going forward.
And thirdly, but definitely not last: our clients!!! The support from existing or new clients has just been amazing. It's been a really challenging 12 months, but we’ve encountered a lot of opportunities, and had a lot of fun.
So we are incredibly grateful for the year we've had. Thank you all for that. Now bring on 2022!
The Olympics are coming to Queensland!!!
We read a really interesting article from Ray White’s Chief Economist, Nerida Conisbee, about the Olympics coming to Brisbane. As we all know, Queensland and Brisbane have been going off a bit in the market recently. We’ve experienced huge growth, huge immigration from the other states, everyone wanting to move up to sunny Queensland. Of course we already knew it was the place to be, it’s the sunshine state! We've known it for ages, but everyone else is catching on.
Nerida talks about The Golden Decade that we're going to experience in Queensland, particularly Brisbane and South East Queensland. Over the past 12 months, the number of million-dollar-plus suburbs has increased by a third. There's been an uplift in pricing of 15%. Obviously the market has increased, we have seen property prices go up. And the Olympics will bring massive benefits around the infrastructure, population growth, and also wage growth in Queensland. In a nutshell, Queensland is a very, very exciting place to be for the next ten years.
Approval timeframes are starting to improve
A lot of banks that had huge backlogs, that were pushed out to 30 days plus, are now bringing that right forward. We saw some improvements from 16-18 days, down to three or four. However, be aware of the side note to that: it has created a huge backlog in the second half of the process. But overall, loan applications are going through quicker. The banks are still incredibly thorough. Therefore, we make sure we spend a lot of time upfront to get the application bank-ready into the system. But then the challenge has been getting the loan documents out. Obviously there’s a little bit of Australia Post involved in some of that. So the certification’s process (when the documents come back, and need to be certified and made ready for settlement) has unfortunately gone from maybe four days up to 12-16 days with some banks.
If we put those timelines together, the 14 to 21 days finance now seems to be more achievable. But the settlement timeframe (30 days for some clients) is becoming really tight. Especially if you've got a discharge of mortgage - some banks might take three to four weeks to get that out. Just give yourself more time on settlement. And if you are selling, or in the process, or listing your property for selling, and you do have a mortgage, then do let your bank know so they can prepare your discharge ASAP.
An exciting side note is that we have quite a number of banks that are now moving towards some form of a DocuSign for loan documents, which is shortening the process. Being brokers, we know who can do that, and we know who can't, so it’s definitely one of the (numerous!) benefits of reaching out and using a broker like us!
Photo: @rodemedia