Specialist vs prime lenders

The three tiers

• Prime: clean credit, verifiable income, standard security, LVR within policy. Sharpest pricing, tightest rules, heavily automated assessment.
• Near-prime: minor blemishes — a paid default, a short employment history, one year of self-employed returns, slightly stretched serviceability. Modest rate premium, manual assessment.
• Specialist: unpaid defaults, judgments, discharged bankruptcy, ATO debt, alt-doc income, complex structures. Priced to risk, larger deposit, always manually assessed.

Why applying at the wrong tier is costly

Every application is a credit enquiry, and clustered enquiries lower your score and read badly to the next assessor. Two or three declines can move a borrower who genuinely belonged in near-prime down into specialist.

Placing the file correctly the first time is most of a broker's value on a difficult application.

Climbing back to prime

• 12–24 months of perfect repayment history on the specialist loan.
• Any default paid and aged; no new adverse listings.
• Reduced LVR through repayments and any capital growth.
• No payday lending, no BNPL stress, no dishonours in the last six months of statements.

A note on rates

Rates and policies change constantly, and every lender prices to its own funding costs and risk appetite. Nothing on this page is a rate quote — it's a guide to how these lender types differ so you know where to look.