Many people prefer to buy a new home before selling their existing one. That's why we’ve come up with a bridging loan to take the headache out of moving house.
Now you can upgrade to the right property at the right time without selling your current home first.
Benefits of a Squirrel bridging loan:
We have limited funding available for bridging loans. If you need to bridge a loan, it's important that you get advice early in the process and that you lock in your funding (if required).
As with any bridging loan, there are fees involved. Squirrel charge 0.50% of the amount borrowed with a minimum fee of $5,000. $1,000 of the fee is payable up front on approval.
When |
Fee payable |
Benefit |
On approval |
$1,000 |
Gives you the ability to buy at auction or go unconditional |
On acceptance |
0.50% of the amount to be borrowed (min. of $5,000 less $1,000 already paid |
We reserve funding for settlement |
The full bridging fee is payable even if you don’t draw down funding because we have to reserve funding from the point you accept our finance offer.
There are no additional costs if you do not need the funding (your current homes sells in time).
Bridging loans are arranged by our mortgage advisers so the first step is to do an application for a new purchase. Your Squirrel adviser will get you approved for that with one of the banks and if the bank is happy to bridge your existing property then that will be the cheapest way of bridging. If they aren’t prepared to (and often they aren’t) that’s where Squirrel can step in. We can give you access to our bridging loan.
Once you buy and lock in our funding the rest of the bridging fee is payable. It doesn’t have to be paid until either the house sells or the loan draws down in which case the fee is added to the loan.
You can buy with a long settlement date and then sell in the interim period. It would still reduce your risk for us to approve bridging finance just in case you don’t sell in time.
Alternatively you can sell first with a long settlement and then try to buy. The challenge with this approach is you might get locked out of the market or might not find the right property and compromise your next purchase.