Andrew Wheatley

I'll try to.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

Like, say, for example, there's a client of mine that's just recently upsized.

So, kept her property, turned it into an investment and bought a bigger home for herself.

And when we were looking around at lenders, obviously, we're comparing rates and fees and products.

But the actual selection we made in the end was we picked the lender that did a valuation on her property that was $150,000 higher than all the other banks we were looking at.

And what it meant was at the end of the day, she was able to hold on to $100,000 worth of her savings that she wouldn't have had if we'd gone with one of the other banks with a lower valuation.

She might not have bought the property because, you know, it's nice to have some savings left over.

So yeah, looking at those valuations is becoming increasingly important.

Yeah, that's something we've had to get used to as mortgage brokers in the industry as well, because a year ago, if I got pre-approval for someone, I would never question that they would still be approved for that amount a month later or six weeks later.

What's happened with things changing so quickly and banks aren't renowned for being fast to adapt to new things.

what was happening is people were getting approved for a certain amount, then there'd be a rate rise, then they purchase and the bank would reassess the loan they'd already approved based on the increase in the interest rate and possibly not lend them what they'd originally said they were going to.

And it was really stressful and really blindsided a lot of people.

So the extra kind of step that for mortgage brokers and for all your listeners out there is if you've got a pre-approval from a bank, you need to ask them what their policy is around that.

are they a bank that when they give you a figure, you can rely on that number up to a certain date, or do you need to go back to them and find out the new number every time there's a rate rise?

It's really important now.

Yeah, well, we all pride ourselves in our job on being professionals and being the expert at what we do.

So anytime there's a lot of change and you sometimes get caught out by a change, you feel really responsible for it because we're an outcome-driven industry and our job on behalf of the clients is to not get surprised, to not get blindsided.

So yeah, when there's a lot of change in the industry, it does get pretty stressful, but that's all temporary.

Once you learn the new rules and you know what's happening, then it's all fine.