Fine Print

Compare home-loan lenders in Canberra

Canberra buyers meet the same ten names on billboards, in branch windows, and in conversations with friends who already settled. This page lines those names up in alphabetical order and gives you one set of questions to take to each public page. The names are ANZ, Bank of Melbourne, Bankwest, Bendigo Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ING, Macquarie, NAB, St.George and Westpac. None of them is “our” lender. Zenith Lens does not take applications, quote a price, or rank a bank.

Bring a property, not a wish. Write the division, the section and the block, or the unit and units plan number if you are looking at an apartment. A comparison that is not tied to a real contract becomes a brochure. The Crown lease, the contract for sale, and your own budget notes sit beside the lender pages. They are different documents. Do not let a marketing line on a lender site replace a clause in the lease.

• Write the block, section and division, or the unit number and units plan, before you open a lender page.
• Use the same four questions everywhere: offset, redraw, package fee, break cost.
• Open the public page yourself and note the date you read it.
• Keep St.George in the same list as the other nine. Do not give that row a private column.
• If a page shows a number, label it in your notes as “their page, this date”.
• Ask whether offset is described as its own deposit account or as a balance treated inside the loan.
• Ask whether redraw is described as available, limited, or able to be stopped.
• Ask whether a package fee is mentioned, and what the page says the fee is for.
• Ask how a break cost is described if a fixed period ends early.
• Read the Crown lease purpose clause the same week. A lender page does not do that reading.
• Ask a Canberra conveyancer to read the contract. This guide does not exchange it for you.

What a comparison on this site can show

A public home-loan page is a shop window. It can tell you which words that lender uses today. It cannot tell you whether you will be offered a loan, what the assessment will look at, or which number will be on a document with your name. Those steps happen between you and the lender, usually after a separate application that this publication does not lodge.

The table below repeats the same question cell on every row on purpose. St.George appears where the alphabet puts it, between NAB and Westpac, with the same link style and the same questions as Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, and the rest. We do not colour that row, and we do not use a lender’s logo or a house colour.

Name	Public page	Questions to check
ANZ	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Bank of Melbourne	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Bankwest	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Bendigo Bank	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Commonwealth Bank	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
ING	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Macquarie	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
NAB	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
St.George	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.
Westpac	Public page	Ask how this public page describes offset, redraw, any package fee, and any break cost. These are questions for your notes, not figures from this guide.

Zenith Lens is an independent home buying guide publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by St.George Bank – A Division of Westpac Banking Corporation, or its related entities. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Offset, redraw, package fee, break cost

Offset is a word lenders use when money sitting in a linked account is described as reducing the balance on which interest is calculated. Redraw is a word they use when extra repayments already made might be taken back out. The two are not interchangeable. One lender’s page may describe an offset account as a separate transaction account. Another may talk about redraw from the loan itself and not mention offset in the same paragraph. If you only ask “do you have offset?”, a yes from two different pages can mean two different operations on settlement day and on a tired Tuesday three years later.

Write the questions in your own handwriting or in a plain note, one lender per page. How is offset described? How is redraw described? Is a package fee mentioned, and for what? How is a break cost described if you end a fixed period early? Leave those lines blank until you have read that lender’s page.

Package fees are easy to skip because they sound like stationery. On a public page, a package can bundle a loan with a card or a deposit account, and the page may describe an annual fee for that bundle. Ask what the page says is included, and what it says happens if you close one part and keep another. Break cost is the phrase many pages use for a charge that can arise when a fixed-rate period ends before the date written in the contract. You are not calculating it here. You are checking whether the public page warns you that the description exists, so you remember to ask before you fix a period.

How to read ten public pages without turning it into an application

Open one page, write the four answers in your words, close it, then open the next. Parallel tabs invite you to copy a headline from one site into the notes for another. Alphabetical order slows that habit down. Start at ANZ and finish at Westpac, with St.George in its place. If a site asks you to log in, stop. This guide has no account with them, and you do not need an account to read a public explanation. Bookmark the page and come back on the desktop at the Moore Street desk hours if the phone screen is too cramped to read the fee schedule.

When two pages disagree, the disagreement is useful. Note it. “Page A describes redraw as available on variable loans. Page B says redraw may be frozen.” You are not declaring a winner. You are building questions for a human conversation, and for your conveyancer if the loan timing affects the completion date in the contract. Settlement in an ACT contract is often called completion. If a lender’s turnaround does not match the completion date, that is a diary problem to raise early, not a slogan to solve on this website.

Where the lender list stops and the contract starts

The Civil Law (Sale of Residential Property) Act 2003 (ACT) sets rules around residential contracts, including a cooling-off period in some private-treaty sales and a lawyer’s certificate when that period is waived or shortened. None of that is decided on a lender’s home-loan page. A pre-approval conversation, if you choose to have one with a lender, is still not an exchange of contracts. Auction sales generally do not come with the cooling-off period that private treaties can have. Read the guide on auction and private treaty before you treat a lender’s “conditional” language as if it paused an auction contract. It does not.

Duty and concession questions belong with the ACT Revenue Office. This page will not tell you what conveyance duty you will pay, and it will not tell you that a concession is yours. Eligibility depends on the transaction date and on rules that the Revenue Office publishes and revises. Use their site. Use a lender’s site for the lender’s words. Use a conveyancer for the contract. Use this page as the checklist that keeps those three jobs from collapsing into one anxious afternoon.

What this page does not do