When Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced the 2% deposit subsidy for single parents buying their first home, many wondered how many people would actually be able to take advantage of it: Great Southern Bank have managed to make it a reality for one of their customers.
The crux of the issue lay with the struggle that many single parents have in getting a mortgage: while the Family Home Guarantee (FHG) was designed to help single parents to get onto the property ladder, finding a bank that would lend to a 98% loan-to-value ratio is another thing entirely.
Cindy, a Great Southern Bank customer in Queensland, has managed to pull it off. She and her mortgage broker managed to hack the system, compounding the First Home Super Saver Scheme (FHSSS) with the FHG and a local state concession to get her preapproval sorted and to begin house-hunting.
“It’s fantastic Cindy was able to secure a home for her family through her mortgage broker,” said Megan Keleher, chief customer officer at Great Southern Bank.
“Great Southern Bank is pleased to enable the Family Home Guarantee scheme for families through our home lenders and a number of brokers. For eligible families, we want to play our role in helping them own and create their own family home.”
“The Great Southern Bank purpose is to help all Australians own their own home and programs like the Family Home Guarantee scheme is an enabler of helping more Australians have a home.”
“Taking advantage of the right schemes can take years off the challenge of saving the deposit for a home. Our own research shows that that one in five homebuyers believe the Government initiatives helped them buy a home sooner.”
“The single most important piece of advice for those in the market for a new home is to talk to someone who lives and breathes these schemes, like a broker or one of our home loan specialists – they know which schemes you might qualify for, potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars and years of saving.”
“As we’re customer owned, we have different goals to the bigger banks. A win for us is genuinely to help our customers. From research we know that there are around one million single parent families in Australia, with the vast majority led by single mothers.”
“Our purpose is to help all Australians to own their own home and families are a large group of people we believe we can help, fulfilling our purpose while at the same time helping more Australians get on or move up the property ladder.”
