Charter Finance arranges residential, investment, SMSF, commercial and specialised lending across more than 50 lenders. Two clients with the same financial position can walk away with very different outcomes depending on who they approach and how their case is presented. Our work sits in that gap.
Every lending area below sits inside the same Financial Wholeness Journey™ framework. The product changes. The thinking about how it connects to the rest of your financial position does not.
First home buyer, owner-occupier, refinance, and construction. The everyday loans that most determine where your wealth lands at retirement.
Read moreSingle-property and multi-property strategy, debt structure for tax efficiency, and serviceability sequencing across the portfolio.
Read moreCommercial SMSF borrowing. Limited recourse borrowing arrangements, bare trust coordination, and a lender panel that still actively writes super-fund loans.
Read moreCommercial property purchase and refinance, business loans, and commercial development finance for owners and investors.
Read moreMedico and professional packages, expat and non-resident lending, self-employed and director income, bridging finance. The cases other brokers refer on.
Read moreYour home loan is the largest single financial commitment most Australians make, and the one with the most policy variation between lenders. We arrange the full spectrum of residential lending: first home, upgrader, refinance, and construction. The work is not in finding "a" loan. The work is in knowing which lender will look most favourably at your income, your living expenses, and the property you want to buy, then structuring the loan so that twenty years from now you are paying less interest and holding more equity than the alternative would have produced.
For first home buyers, that means navigating the government schemes (First Home Guarantee, regional schemes, stamp duty concessions) and the lenders who genuinely make them work. For construction, it means working with lenders who release funds on schedule and value the build the way your builder values it. Refinance is its own section below, because the value we add there usually has less to do with the new rate than with what we do with the structure around it.
Refinancing usually starts with a rate conversation, and a lower rate is a real win. But it is rarely the biggest one. The bigger win, particularly for non-deductible owner-occupier debt, is what gets done with the structure: an offset that captures the household's cash, a repayment schedule that redirects the rate saving back into principal, and a split that opens the path to debt recycling once you are ready.
This is where Charter Finance adds the most value at refinance time. We benchmark the rate, then design the structure around it so what is saved on interest is captured in equity, not absorbed into lifestyle. Existing clients are on a 12-month review cycle; lender pricing shifts, and so does your borrowing profile.
Illustrative. Real outcomes depend on full financial review and specific loan terms.
Cross-collateralisation, interest-only versus principal and interest, where deductible debt sits versus non-deductible debt, and which entity holds each loan all determine how quickly the portfolio scales and how the ATO treats the interest.
Run the borrowing capacity calculatorInvestment lending looks like a residential loan with the rate slightly higher and the rules slightly different. It is not. The investment loan you choose at property one will determine whether property two is even possible, and whether property three lives in the same entity, a different trust, or never gets built at all. Charter Finance works on the lending structure before the property selection, because the structure has more influence on the long-term outcome than the suburb does.
We arrange single-property investment loans for first investors. We also work with experienced portfolio holders restructuring across multiple properties, releasing equity for the next acquisition, separating loans that should never have been cross-collateralised, and managing the move from interest-only back to principal and interest at the right point in the cycle. For an investor's deeper view of the strategy side, the Property Investors page sits underneath this one.
Read more in our Property Investors section, or run the First Investment Property calculator with your real numbers.
The major banks have largely exited SMSF lending, and from July 2027 the rules have tightened further: you can no longer secure a limited recourse borrowing arrangement to buy residential property inside a super fund. Commercial SMSF borrowing, however, is still permitted. The space is now held by a smaller group of specialist and non-bank lenders, each with its own view on minimum fund balance, liquidity buffer, contribution patterns, and acceptable property type. Charter Finance has maintained active relationships with these lenders for years, particularly for commercial SMSF lending where the policy is especially narrow. We coordinate the structure end-to-end with your accountant and the lawyer setting up the bare trust, so the property contract, the trust deed, and the loan all move in the right order.
With new residential limited recourse borrowing arrangements no longer available, commercial property is where SMSF lending still works. For trustees buying commercial property through the fund, including the common business-owner strategy of buying premises and leasing them back to your own trading entity at arm's-length market rent. The lender's recourse is limited to the property itself, which protects the rest of the fund's assets if anything goes wrong. Lender appetite is narrow, but the right structure can produce strong long-term outcomes for the fund.
An SMSF property purchase requires the accountant (for the fund and the bare trust), the lawyer (for the bare trust deed and the property contract), and the lender (for the loan) to move together. If the bare trust is set up after the contract is signed, the contract is generally void from an SMSF compliance standpoint and the deposit may be at risk. Charter Finance sits between these moving parts so the order of operations is right the first time. We have written enough of these loans to know where each lender's policy bites, and where each accountant's process tends to slow down.
Commercial lending is its own market. The servicing calculator looks different, the security required is different, the loan terms are shorter, and the appetite for any given borrower changes from one lender to the next more sharply than it does for residential. We arrange commercial property purchase and refinance, business loans, and development finance for owners and investors stepping out of residential into commercial for the first time, as well as for clients managing established commercial portfolios.
A common case: a business owner wants to buy the premises they currently lease. The right strategy is usually to acquire it inside the SMSF (covered above) or inside a separate investment entity, with the trading business paying market rent. The lending question, the tax question and the asset-protection question all need to be answered together, which is why we work closely with your accountant rather than around them.
For developers managing project finance alongside personal wealth, see the Developers section.
Specialised lending is where lender policy varies most and where good advice has the biggest impact. These are the situations where one lender's "no" should be treated as data, not as a verdict.
LMI-waived lending to 90% LVR for eligible medical professionals (and to 95% for selected specialties). Similar concessions exist for lawyers, accountants, and engineers, with eligibility criteria that vary by lender. The waiver is the easy part; the structure built around it is the work. For medical professionals, see the Medicos section. For other professionals, see Professionals.
Australian citizens living and working overseas, particularly in Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE, the UK, and the US, can still borrow against Australian property. The lender shortlist is narrower and the income evidence requirements are different (foreign payslips, FX considerations, employer letters), but the lending is genuinely available with the right lender. We have the relationships to make it work.
Two years of company tax returns, trust distributions, retained earnings sitting on the balance sheet, and the add-backs that one lender accepts and another does not. Self-employed lending is where servicing calculators diverge most sharply between lenders, and where presentation matters as much as the underlying numbers. We work closely with your accountant to make sure the paperwork tells the right story for the right lender.
When your purchase settles before your sale, or your sale settles before your purchase, a bridging facility lets the dust settle without forcing a fire sale. Each lender has its own appetite for end-debt position, valuation method, and bridging term. Bridging is short and tactical, but doing it wrong is expensive.
A residential investment loan looks like a uniform thing from the outside. A rate, an LVR cap, a fixed or variable choice. What never appears on the lender's website is the policy that sits underneath: which slice of your income they count and which they discount, what they assume your living expenses are, what postcode and apartment size they will lend on, what they do with your contracted bonuses or trust distributions or overtime, and which servicing calculator they run you through.
Two clients with identical financial positions can be quoted borrowing capacities $200K apart by two different lenders, not because one is "better" than the other but because each lender is solving a different policy puzzle. Working out which puzzle you fit is the actual job. A rate comparison site cannot do it. A bank's own broker cannot do it without bias. A good adviser does it before the application is lodged, not after the first lender has said no.
A knock-back from one lender is information about that lender. It is not a verdict on you.
A hospital consultant on a $290K base, with regular on-call loading, RSUs from a side-business equity arrangement, and a partner on parental leave. Two lenders, both with publicly identical rates and LVR caps, both presented with the same financials.
Anonymised illustration. Real outcomes depend on full financial review. Charter Finance does not guarantee any specific borrowing capacity outside that review process.
A doctor buying an investment property needs the medico lens AND the property investment lens AND the right lender. We map your situation across product and circumstance so the advice and the loan both fit. Each link below opens the matching client-focused section.
Building, restructuring, or scaling a residential or mixed portfolio. Cashflow modelling, debt structure for tax efficiency, and strategic sequencing of acquisitions.
For property investorsLawyers, accountants, engineers and senior salaried professionals. Strategic use of LMI-waived lending and the structure that turns capacity into compounding wealth.
For professionalsDoctors, dentists, specialists. LMI-waived lending to 90% LVR (and higher for selected specialties), and the strategy beyond the waiver that compounds across a medical career.
For medical professionalsConstruction finance, project funding, and the personal wealth strategy that turns each project's profit into long-term equity rather than circulating it back into the next deal.
For developersGeneral information only. For advice specific to your circumstances, speak with a Charter Finance adviser.
No paperwork, no forms, no application yet. A direct discussion about your situation, what you are trying to achieve, and whether we are the right team for the job. If we can help, we will say so. If we can't, we will say that too.
Book a ConversationYour live financial dashboard pre-loaded with the data Charter Finance already holds from your lending. Track your Financial Wholeness Index over time and run the calculators with your real numbers.
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