A mortgage broker for self employed borrowers

Who this is for

You run a business, contract or freelance, and your taxable income does not reflect what the business genuinely earns. Perhaps your income swings between years, or a lender has declined you and nobody explained whether that was you or their rulebook.

It is almost always their rulebook.

How the process works

1. We understand the business first. Structure, trading history, and how income actually reaches you. Sole trader, company and trust each get read differently.
2. We match documents to the lender. Full-doc where your financials support it, and alternative documentation only where they genuinely do not yet.
3. We present the income properly. Add-backs identified, retained profits explained, one-off costs separated from ongoing ones. Presentation is frequently the difference between a yes and a no on identical numbers.
4. We manage it to settlement. With your accountant looped in when lender verification needs them. Credit teams ring accountants more often in this segment. Nobody should be surprised by that call.

What a broker does that a bank doesn’t

A bank applies its own self-employed policy and stops there, which is why the same financials can produce a decline at one lender and a comfortable approval at another. We know which lenders suit which business structures before anything is lodged, and that matters more here than in any other segment, because a declined application leaves a mark on your credit file that the next lender can see.

We also speak accountant, so add-backs, distributions and retained earnings get presented the way credit teams read them rather than the way tax returns present them.

How lenders actually read business income

The gap between what your business earns and what a lender counts is where most self-employed applications live or die. Credit teams start from tax returns that your accountant has legitimately optimised to minimise taxable income, then reconstruct real capacity through add-backs. Depreciation, one-off expenses, interest on debts being refinanced, superannuation above the compulsory rate and salaries paid to a spouse can all come back into assessable income, and which of those a lender accepts is pure policy that varies more than almost any other credit setting.

Structure adds a second layer, because company profits, trust distributions and director salaries each flow through assessment differently, and retained profits sitting in a company are counted by some lenders and ignored entirely by others. If your income dipped and recovered, some average the years, some take the latest, some take the lower. Same business, three answers. Our borrowing power calculator shows the mechanics that sit underneath all of them.

Full-doc, alt-doc and the premium between them

Full-doc means standard verification with financial statements and tax returns, assessed like any other income, and if your paperwork supports it you get the widest lender choice and the sharpest pricing available. That is where we aim first. Every time, without exception.

Alt-doc substitutes other evidence, usually business activity statements, business bank statements or an accountant's declaration, for borrowers whose financials are genuinely not ready or not representative yet. It is real lending with real verification, priced somewhat higher for the flexibility. Low-doc, the loosest historical version, has largely tightened into today's alt-doc policies since responsible lending rules matured. Here is the part that costs us money to say: never pay an alt-doc premium if your financials can carry a full-doc application, and sometimes the right advice is simply to wait until this year's returns are finalised.

What to have ready before we approach a lender

Nothing needs to be perfect for a first conversation, and Loc would rather see messy figures early than polished ones late. Settlement moves fastest when this set is close at hand:

• Recent business and personal tax returns with notices of assessment.
• Profit and loss statements and balance sheets for the same period.
• Business activity statements, if returns are not finalised yet.
• Business and personal bank statements.
• Your accountant's contact details.