Mortgage broker Wembley

Green title, survey strata, and why your title matters to a lender

Split a Wembley block and you end up with one of two outcomes. Either two green title lots, each with its own frontage, or a survey strata scheme with a shared driveway and a slice of common property attached to each lot.

Buyers and owners rarely give that much thought, because on the ground the two look almost identical. Lenders and valuers treat them as different propositions, and the difference shows up in the valuation and in which part of the panel will write the loan.

• Green title lots are the simplest for a lender, with no scheme documents and no common property to read
• Survey strata lots come with a strata plan, and some lenders want to know how many lots sit in the scheme
• Where the scheme carries insurance or driveway maintenance, those levies count as a commitment against your borrowing power
• A rear or battle-axe lot behind an existing house is commonly valued more conservatively than the street-front dwelling
• Until a new lot has its own title, only part of the panel will value it at all

None of this stops a project. It decides which lender the file belongs with, and finding that out after the plan has been lodged is the expensive way to learn it.

Building at the rear when you already own the front

The common Wembley project keeps the existing house and puts one or two grouped dwellings behind it. The block is usually deep enough to make that work without demolishing anything, which is the main reason it happens here so much more than in the tighter suburbs closer to town.

Financially that is a different exercise to buying a house. The equity in the land you already own carries the deposit, the build draws down in stages, and you are servicing the whole facility from the day it settles.

1. 1

   Test the servicing before you test the design

   What the block can take and what you can repay are two separate answers. Get the second one first, because it sets the budget for the first.

2. 2

   Decide early whether the new dwelling is kept or sold

   A build to hold is assessed with a shaded rental figure against the full debt. A build to sell is assessed on the sale, and lenders ask harder questions about it.

3. 3

   Price the holding period honestly

   From approval to completion the project earns nothing while carrying debt, and rates on a construction facility are not frozen for your convenience.

4. 4

   Hold a contingency outside the loan

   Service connections and site works on an established Wembley block are where the surprises live. Money you have to go back and ask for costs time you do not have.

Where a block supports three or more dwellings, it stops being construction finance and becomes development finance. Different lenders, different terms, and a lender who wants to see the numbers rather than just your payslips.

What Wembley clients come to us for

Not everything here is a project. A good share of the work is ordinary lending on ordinary houses, for families buying near the Cambridge Street shops and owners who have not looked at their loan since they took it out.

The strip itself brings its own files. Cambridge Street through Wembley is a working shopping street rather than a row of offices, so we see the people who run the shops as well as the people who live behind them. Owner-occupied commercial premises are assessed differently to an investment tenancy, and the deposit expected is usually larger than on a house.

• Construction finance for rear grouped dwellings and knock-down-rebuild on the larger lots
• Development finance where a Wembley block supports three or more dwellings
• Home loans for buyers competing for a family house near the Cambridge Street shops
• Refinancing and equity release against land that has been held a long time
• Commercial loans for owner-occupied premises along the Cambridge Street strip

Being a few minutes away is a practical advantage on this kind of work rather than a slogan. Plans, contracts and strata drawings are quicker to go through across a table, and our end of Cambridge Street is a short drive from yours.