by Paul McBeth
The success of ANZ's "Summer Breeze" home loan deal has prompted the bank to extend it three weeks until March 30.
The deal offers customers home loan assessment and approval in as little as 45 minutes and a $25 CD voucher if successfully approved. Steve Fisher, ANZ's External Media Relations Manager, said it had been running from mid February and was originally due to finish last week. However, he said the "very positive response" had encouraged ANZ to extend the promotion.
Fisher said that home loan applications had averaged 780 a week for the five weeks before the promotion started, and that had now increased to 900 a week. Getting a loan approved in 45 minutes depended on having all the paperwork filled out correctly, but he said only a very few had missed out "and one of those was because of a fire drill!"
Across town, ASB Bank has also been trying to put some sizzle into the season with their Summer Home Loan Challenge, which offers people with the right paperwork "an answer on your home loan within 60 minutes (and if we don't you'll get a $25 Mitre 10 voucher)".
Barbara Chapman, General Manager Marketing and Human Resources for ASB Bank, said the promotion started in mid January and would go a "wee while longer" (it's advertised as finishing March 31). All she would say beyond that was that it was going "extremely well and we're very pleased with how consumers are reacting to it".
Meanwhile, ASB Bank offshoot BankDirect has also been doing its own home loan promotion by running a couple of online tenders, where potential borrowers can name an interest rate they'd like to pay and see if they get lucky. The latest of these was a month ago (see earlier story), but BankDirect's Marketing Manager Kevin Leith said it was still too early to give the final results from that tender.
However, BankDirect has said it would consider making its online loan tenders a regular channel for homeowners, given their popular support.