We will help you arrange a mortgage or other forms of finance required to purchase or refinance a property.
We will guide you through the process of buying property including helping you navigate your due diligence.
Our mortgage brokers help first home buyers, property investors and busy professionals successfully buy around $2 billion of property every year. Our expert advice is usually free to you and will save you money so you can spend it on things you actually want. We can help you make the right property decisions, provide feedback on prospective properties, and help you with your due diligence once you find a place you like.
We look at and research hundreds of properties every month to help our clients get the best possible deals. Helping Kiwis find, buy, renovate, build, and finance property is what we do, so we are experts at it (if we do say so ourselves).
Squirrel advisers are paid the same regardless of which lender they recommend, and do not receive any incentive to put one provider's product in front of another, including our own. This means they have no agenda to push any particular lender or insurer (the ‘Provider’) - they’re there only to find you the right home loan.
As a business, Squirrel is usually paid an upfront commission directly by the Provider and in some cases an additional trailing commission over the life of the loan. Commissions are typically calculated as a percentage of the loan value at a rate that can vary by Provider.
This all means we don’t normally have to charge you for the services we provide.
| Service Fee | Clawback Recovery Fee |
|---|---|
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In certain situations, Squirrel may have to charge you a service fee for services rendered, including where: An upfront commission is not offered by the Provider your loan will be sourced through; The services we provide you are advisory in nature or involve a significant amount of work that will not result a commissionable transaction; or Your loan is expected to be repaid within a short timeframe and thus incur a full commission clawback; Any proposed service fee will be discussed with you as soon as it becomes clear that it will be required and will only be charged following your formal acceptance of that fee. |
If a loan is repaid within 27 months of settlement (the ‘Clawback Period’), Squirrel may have some or all of the original upfront commission ‘clawed back’ by the Provider. To ensure that Squirrel is fairly compensated for the services originally provided to you, we may seek to recover some or all of this cost from you via a clawback recovery fee. If you are charged a clawback recovery fee, it will be charged at the lower of the actual commission clawback amount or 0.35% of the balance repaid. For example: $500,000 of lending repaid within the clawback period would result in Squirrel charging you a clawback recovery fee of up to $1,750. For Launchpad base loans, if you are charged a Clawback Recovery Fee, it will be charged at the full commission that’s been clawed back by the Provider. The Clawback recovery fee will be 0.60% x original loan amount x scaling for the time the loan was active. The scaling period is shown below.
Eg: $500,000 of lending repaid within the first 12 months clawback period would work out to a fee from Squirrel of up to $3,000.00 (e.g. $500,000 x 0.6%). Examples of when we may charge you a clawback recovery fee include:
We will not charge you a clawback recovery fee if we were given the opportunity to secure new lending or refinancing for you but were unable to at least match a finance approval that you obtained elsewhere, or if we charged you an upfront Service Fee for arranging the original loan. |
Squirrel advisers are paid the same no matter which lender you end up with, and they don't receive any incentive to put one provider’s product in front of another including our own. Our promise is to always provide the best possible solution and put our clients' interests first.
Occasionally we may recommend a Squirrel loan as the best option for the client.
We have referral relationships with Advice First/AMP for insurance. If you decide to take one of their products or recommendations, they will pay us a commission. The amount of the commission is based on the particular insurance product and the amount of premium you pay.
From time-to-time we may have a direct or indirect relationship with the buyer or seller of a property and this will be disclosed to you.
We maintain a register of conflicts of interest. This register is maintained and disclosure guidance provided to advisers as required. Where there is potential for a conflict of interest you can expect this to be properly and fully disclosed to you.
We want to give you the best experience possible. If we’ve let you down in any way, please let us know and we’ll do our best to make things right.
If your complaint cannot be resolved through our internal complaints process in steps 1 and 2 we encourage you to refer to our independent disputes resolution scheme Financial Services Complaints Ltd.
If we cannot agree on how to fix the issue, or if you decide not to use the internal complaints scheme, you can contact our external disputes resolution scheme – Financial Services Complaints Ltd (FSCL) - A Financial Ombudsman Service. This service will cost you nothing, and will help us resolve any disagreements.
Anything you discuss with us, and any information you give us, stays secure and confidential. If you want to see or correct any of that information at any time, you can.
Information provided by you will be used by Squirrel for the purpose of providing advice to you and may also be used by any lender or insurer when implementing any of our recommendations.
If you are referred to us for a mortgage by a third-party that has a referral relationship with us, such as a construction company or builder, we may provide a representative of that third-party the status of your loan application to enable that third-party to provide products or services to you.
We may also release information to other professionals such as solicitors, accountants, finance brokers or financial planners when such services are required to complement our advice and as requested by you. From time to time we share customer demographic and location data with contracted third parties to assist us with market research, targeting and analysis to help make our services better. This does not include sharing information that specifically identifies you the individual. You can access our full Privacy Policy here.
You can request our disclosure statement by calling 0800 21 22 30 or you'll find it on our legal agreements page. All Rights Reserved.
Cleanse your palate over at Views from the Treehouse, our blog on the housing market and the broader economy.