The Investment Home

Purchasing in your own name is the most straightforward structure and the most accessible from a lending perspective. Lenders know how to assess it, the application process is simpler, and for many investors buying their first one or two properties it is entirely appropriate.

As a portfolio grows, the personal name structure can start to feel limiting. Asset protection, borrowing capacity and long-term planning all become considerations that push investors toward thinking about alternatives. Your accountant is the right person to help you work out when that conversation is worth having.

A discretionary family trust gives you flexibility in how income is managed across the trust's beneficiaries. Assets held in a trust also sit outside your personal estate, which provides a layer of protection that appeals to investors building larger portfolios.

Trusts come with setup and ongoing compliance costs, and not all lenders will lend to them. Borrowing capacity is also assessed differently inside a trust structure. This is not something to set up without proper legal and accounting advice running alongside the lending conversation, and it is a structure we are experienced in working through with your advisers.

A Special Purpose Vehicle, or SPV, is a company created specifically to hold a single investment asset. It is a structure used by investors who want to ring-fence individual properties, limit liability between assets, and create a clean separation between their investment portfolio and their personal finances.

Lenders assess company borrowing differently to personal borrowing, and the structure has its own set of rules around serviceability and security. The lending conversation and the accounting conversation need to happen at the same time with this one. Your accountant needs to be across it from the start.

If you are building deliberately, creating separate entities for separate assets and thinking several moves ahead, we want to be part of that conversation early.

For investors with sufficient superannuation balances and a long horizon, purchasing property inside a Self-Managed Super Fund through a Limited Recourse Borrowing Arrangement is a well-established strategy with its own set of structural advantages.

With over twenty years of SMSF lending experience, this is a structure we know well. We have a dedicated page that covers it in full, and we are happy to walk you through whether it suits your fund's position.