astrial: I think this is an issue that more people should be able to review so I'm going to add my two cents (rates) here. We took out a mortgage in April so this is a bit old and probably at the start of the so-called 'mortgage war' that is apparently occurring at the moment.
Note that banks will take into account your personal circumstances such as salary, LVR and risk when offering discounts on rates.
We have 5.14% floating at the moment, which is 0.46% off carded rate with our bank. My understanding is that most of the time banks offer this for a period, say 2 years, before you go back to the standard carded rate. Our discount is for the life of the loan (which confused our lawyer no end).
I have heard some people (probably high equity) are getting less than 5% on floating rates at the moment.
We also have 5.5% fixed for 3 years, which is about 0.4% off carded but I would definitely expect to receive better than this at the moment.
Edit: we negotiated this ourselves but I have a friend at a competing bank who was able to provide me with very good quotes to shift business to them at the time we had signed on the dotted line with the house, but had not arranged the specifics of the finance with the bank we had pre-approval with.
Thanks for sharing, very useful and worth more then 2 cents
Even when we took out the mortgage last year, the bank offered us 0.75 points discount from the carded rate but this discount is valid for 2 years only.
Your getting it for the life of the loan is fantastic indeed!
At the time, we had very low equity and therefore did not negotiate further. But now we are hoping to get better deals as we have more equity in the house. Let's see what offer we get, will post it here.
