How long for finance approval?

How long does it usually take from the time you lodge your application for a home loan to you get an answer (hopefully unconditional approval, or approval subject to council approval)? Ours is a loan for both land and construction.

I realise it varies (especially with construction loans), but I'm just after a rough time frame because we have to extend our land finance and settlement dates, and I need to know when to set the new date. We will lodge the application right before Christmas, and they want to set the new finance date as 18th Jan. That gives us about 2 weeks if you count the Christmas break, so I'm not sure this will be enough.

We got ours in under a week. It was for a construction loan, it is unconditional but they won't release the money for the build until we have council approval.
We're in WA. We went with a mortgage broker.

Thanks for that detailed information, fmac! I really appreciate it. We are going through a broker too, so fingers crossed it will be that quick for us too!

Hi how did use go.We have been waiting for 2 weeks now.Was told thursday that the bank has passed it and they passed it onto the creditors.So today i rang and they said it has been recomended and waiting on the recomenders to pass it.Its my first home loan and we are wanting to build.Just dont understand how come it has taken this long and recomenders never heard that 1 before

I recently got formal approval for a construction loan with Bankwest. Put all the documents in on the Friday, pre-approval completed on the Tuesday and final approval two days later on the Thursday.

Same as fmac, I went with a mortgage broker.

Guys this depends on so many things that it just isn't possible to compare apples with apples:

• High LVR loans (if you borrow over 80% of the land plus construction cost) take longer.
• Complex loans e.g. trusts, self employed, >$1m loan size etc will take longer.
• If not all documents are provided then the loan will be delayed.
• If the loan does not pass credit scoring then the loan will be delayed.
• The valuer is an external contractor and not an employee of the lender, so sometimes they are fast and other times they are slow.
• And of course different lenders take different amounts of time.

As a rough rule allow a week to two weeks for a construction loan. However it is possible for it to take less or more time.

Well we got pre approved today so pretty happy

Good to hear Dayjo! Congrats!

We're still wanting for our PRE-approval, because they found some bad credit that they thought was ours (in DH's name), but it's not. We've had to go to the police and everything to prove that it's a case of stolen identity, and once the debt is cleared and our credit is fine, they can continue processing it. It's really annoying, because we were hoping to have lodged our application for full approval by now, but instead we're still waiting for pre-approval.

Did you use a mortgage broker? Ours said he would do a credit check on us before submitting to the bank to check for those kinds of things, that way if anything came back we could get it sorted before we submitted to the bank...

Yeah, we are using a broker, but we told him we didn't have any debt and had never used credit cards, etc, so I guess he didn't think there was any point.

Makes sense

Just to give an update on our situation... The pre-approval that we were initially waiting for was actually a full approval application, our broker informed us of after I questioned why we were bothering with the pre-approval. Shortly after that we got conditional approval, and we are now waiting for unconditional approval. It is taking a long time, it took about a week and a half to get the conditional, and they still have to do valuation, which I'm really worried about. Anyway, wish us luck! Hoping to get the results this week because our finance date for the land is the week after, so we don't have much time.

We just went through this the other week. Mortgage submitted loan application, one day later we got conditional then week later bank called wanting to come do valuation of current home. Then couple days later we got unconditional.

I don;t think it would take not more than one week. My home loan was approved within one month. The only thing you need to remember that the complete documentation for the loan, home plan maps, required proof for repayment etc. It is also depends on what finance company you have chosen. The different finance company has different terms and conditions for loan approval.

For our construction loan (owner builder) it took:
St George - 3 months (to formally reject)
Westpac - 9 days (to approve)

I think it depends on a lot of things, we didn't think it would take long to get approval for the construction of our home (we already had the land). However
-we have a number of investment properties (well over $1m),
-the area in which we have the land has basically nil empty blocks, therefore the banks found it difficult to value the land (with ANZ and CBA valuing an $80K difference), and
-we are using a custom builder, therefore building costs are higher than the standard volume builder. ANZ did mention that the building costs were a lot higher than volume builders, we did state that we are getting a lot of things that volume builders simply wouldn't include.

ANZ didn't take into account what the actual finished home would be valued at, CBA did.