Mortgage brokers on the Northern Beaches

The Northern Beaches are three different lending markets that happen to share a council, and the first question we ask changes as you move up the coast. There’s no branch here. Charlie and Sina write these loans from our office in West Pymble. This page covers the three suburbs where most of that work lands: Manly, Dee Why and Frenchs Forest.

Manly: title type before anything else

Manly is a strata market with a ferry attached. It sits 17 kilometres north-east of the CBD across just 5.6 square kilometres, and postcode 2095 recorded a median strata sale of $1,960,000 in the December 2025 quarter, which carries $89,087 in transfer duty on the 2026-27 brackets in our stamp duty calculator. House sales were too thin that quarter for a reliable median at all.

A number of older blocks near the Corso, which runs from the wharf to the beach, are company title rather than strata. That one distinction removes a good part of the panel, and the lenders who stay cap the loan-to-value ratio lower. Short-stay letting narrows it again, because some lenders won’t count holiday income at all. Charlie asks about title and intended use before he asks about income.

Dee Why: the building decides the loan

Dee Why is close to a pure apartment market, with 81.9% flats, units or apartments against 15.3% separate houses. Several lenders on our panel apply postcode exposure caps in areas this dense, and a few cap their holdings in a single building, so a lender can be full in your block before you make an offer. Nothing on your payslip changes that.

Postcode 2099 recorded a median strata sale of $1,133,000 in the same quarter, with $45,172 in duty. That’s above the $1,000,000 upper limit for NSW first home relief, so a buyer at the median gets no concession. Houses were a different market again at $2,700,000. Sina reads the building before the borrower: how many recent sales a valuer will find inside the complex, how close the unit sits to the forty square metre floor most of the panel treats as hard, and how investor-heavy the block is.

Frenchs Forest: loan size and sequencing

Frenchs Forest is the opposite problem. Separate houses make up 92.5% of dwellings, so strata questions disappear and loan size replaces them, because family houses on real blocks push borrowing toward the limits lenders set on single-security exposure. Postcode 2086 recorded a median house sale of $2,510,000, carrying $119,337 in duty, and none of that can be borrowed against the house you’re buying.

Most of our work here is upgrading: a sale running underneath a purchase, two settlements that have to land in the right order. Timing is the risk. Northern Beaches Hospital opened in 2019 with a rezoning for around 2,200 new homes. Medical staff are now a real share of the enquiries we take from the suburb, which brings the medical LMI waivers into play for eligible roles.

Where we land, and what we won’t promise

Our opinion, and beachside agents will dispute it: the ferry premium in Manly is already priced, so paying more again for a partial water view rarely pays you back on resale. In Dee Why, the older, larger two-bedroom units on quieter streets are a better long-term hold than compact new stock near the highway, because floor area is what lenders and tenants keep valuing.

The caveat, said before you bid rather than after: a compact unit in a holiday-let-heavy or investor-heavy block means a short lender list, a bigger deposit and a real chance we tell you it won’t work. That’s the market, not you. On an upgrade, we can line a sale and a purchase up carefully, but we can’t guarantee the other side’s finance clears on a fixed date.

If you’re buying before you sell, the bridging loan calculator shows the end debt at a sale price you’d accept on a bad day, and the rest of our areas, mostly the Upper North Shore around our West Pymble office, are on the suburbs hub.