Brisbane high school teacher Nidean purchased her first home with her fiancé earlier this year. They’d saved for a deposit and Nidean’s mum, Marion, helped them get across the line. “It was always our intention to give her money back, so we made the decision that we didn’t want a guarantor. We’re both the kind of people that don’t like owing other people things,” says Nidean.
Marion had actually used uno to refinance a loan and recommended Nidean chat to home loans adviser Tian Liu, who had worked extremely hard to help her.
“He was great: always contacting mum and I would say definitely going above and beyond what was the call of duty,” she says. “I contacted Tian and said, ‘we’d really like to work with you just because I know how good you were for her’.
As first home buyers, Nidean and her partner were eligible for the first homeowners grant and Tian talked them through a few things they needed to do to get the ball rolling.
“He explained to me the conditions of the grant, such as you’ll need to buy a place for under $500,000 [to be eligible], and the benefits – that you don’t pay capital gains tax and stamp duty and all those sorts of things.
“Knowing that made it a lot easier to look for properties and helped me filter the search,” Nidean says, adding it was a challenge to find a brand new home for under $500,000 in close proximity to the area they wanted to be in.
Nidean and her fiancé were about to submit documents to uno for pre approval when Nidean stumbled across ‘the one’.
“I was driving home a different way than I normally do and drove through this estate I didn’t know existed. I went home, had a bit of a search and found a place. We went and looked at it on the weekend and we put an offer on it,” she says.
“When I saw that property, we jumped on it quickly, because I knew there wasn’t a whole lot of time for us to make a decision.”
Marion helped them make a good offer on the property. “She’s a pretty good negotiator and a good conversationalist in those moments,” says Nidean.
“I think we were lucky in the sense that the offer was reasonable and they were willing to accept. And the benefit of buying a brand new home is that no one else has lived in it. So, there was no pressure on anyone to get out of there and for us to get in.”
And Marion was eager to see her daughter get a leg up on the property ladder. “I wanted Nidean to buy something because it’s going to get harder and harder for these young people to buy property,” she says.
uno was able to move quickly, working extra hard to get the application over the line. “There were a few hiccups along the way,” says Nidean. We worked with Tian mostly in the beginning, then Torika and then with Remonda.
“Remonda probably had the toughest job towards the end because the finance was saying that we needed an extension on the settlement date and that could have cost us a lot of money. She worked so hard to push and escalate what she needed to so that we could get it in on time. It all happened very fast.”
When it came to finding the right loan, Nidean says she put her total trust in uno. “What I’ve learned, and I often reflect on processes that we go through, is that, it’s a very complex process to buy a house. I would have had no idea what I was doing if I didn’t go through a broker,” she says.
“I would ring Tian and say, ‘can you just check that I filled out this form properly?’ And he would say, ‘oh, no, you need to tick this box.’ And I just thought, ‘imagine if I sent it off.’ It’s a time saver. It also feels like a form of security in knowing that what you’re doing is through someone who’s credible.”
Nidean and her fiancé moved in earlier this year. She is proud of what they went through and overjoyed by the outcome. “Last year when I was thinking about buying a house it seemed so impossible. After talking to Tian and hearing, ‘here are your options’, I knew there was a little bit of hope there; that it was possible,” she says.
“I see it as a big compliment to us and just think it’s a huge achievement to say, ‘we’ve done it’.”
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