Basecorp positioning as a one stop shop for advisers
The non-bank lender has spent the past couple of years broadening its product range and finished last year with a mortgage book of about $1.15 billion.
Wednesday, March 11th 2026, 8:43PM
by Sally Lindsay
As one of the biggest non-bank lenders, director and chief financial officer John Moody says Basecorp can lend on any property that can be secured by way of a first mortgage.
Whether that is the short-term or long-term market in residential, commercial, vacant land, small apartments from 30m2 up to 20 hectare lifestyle blocks, Moody says it means advisers can access a wide range of product types and potential securities.
He says listening to advisers over the past couple of years about the difficulties they have encountered when seeking bank finance has led to the product mix and increasing volumes of business, particularly during the last half of 2025 and carrying on into this year.
Those difficulties have included banks being unable to deal with complexity, any short term finance or asset based finance and turnaround times, particularly as activity in the property market has increased.
“Whether the issues about turnaround times are isolated solely to the adviser channel or just representative of a broader problem in terms of the level of applications they've been receiving, of have had to transfer is an open question.
“At the end of last year, I think the banks struggled with some of those refinance specials in the market, especially around the 1.5% cashback offers and that's been positive for the non-bank sector.
“Banks have been focused on the refinance market and that is probably on balance healthy for the non-bank sector as finance companies like ourselves are a sales-led rather than refinance-led lenders.
“We have seen a pickup in our ability to fund sales simply because the banks have been focused on a lot of the refinance market.”
While there are issues, he says it is clear banks are more open for business than they have been for some time. “There has been some loosening up of their approach to things like affordability and consumer credit generally and that is healthy for the broader economy.”
Moody says as expected lower interest rates have played a part in Basecorp attracting more business from advisers who have used the lender in the past and encouragingly from new advisers looking for non-bank deals.
As interest rates have dropped about 3% from their recent highs, Basecorp has mirrored that decline. “That has led to more business volumes and an easier conversation for advisers to have with their clients in terms of a non-bank lending option. We have seen that leading to improvements in our overall book quality as well.”
Although swap rates started rising last year after the RBNZ said at its November review it had ended its cuts to the OCR, Moody says while those increases are representative of banks’ one- to two-year fixed rates, Basecorp funds off the short end of the curve.
“We fund from wholesale facilities that are primarily funded in the bank bill rates. The one- to three-month bank bill rates have been a bit more stable in recent months.
The swap rates are something we are mindful of but they don’t directly impact our own cost of funds or the cost of our interest rates to borrowers.”
However, the Iran war is expected to have an impact on interest rates with the financial markets pricing in two rates hikes this year from the RBNZ because of higher oil prices. Only one increase was pencilled in before the war started.
In the non-bank short-term market, Moody says competition is increasing. He says there is no question there are a large number of participants offering short-term finance with varying sizes of books.
The largest players are First Mortgage Trust and Avanti but there are an increasing number of peer-to-peer lenders and Australian firms making their mark in the short-term arena, while the longer term finance market has been a struggle.
“We have seen the issues in some of the commentary around Australian-based Bluestone and Resimac leaving the market. They have highlighted how difficult it has been to attract regular long-term borrowers to price competitively.
Basecorp offers up to 30-year traditional table mortgages when bank funding isn’t available.
“It's been a difficult space to play, particularly as the banks have become more competitive over the past 12 months. While there is less competition in that space that doesn't make it any less of a difficult environment at present. It's a smaller number of loans overall, albeit it's a much healthier environment than it's been for several years.
“Because of the increasing activity in the refinance market it has been difficult to hold on to customers.”
Moody says Basecorp’s short term product has always been a bridge to refinancing long-term with a bank but it has had some success in funding borrowers onto its longer-term product when the bank finance exit has not been available. “It’s also been a successful way of thinking about our short term product in many ways.”
Basecorp can see mortgage book growth of $100-200 million this year being achievable if the company can continue to do the right things internally and via the adviser market.
While industry data is not readily available on where it sits in the market, Moody believes Basecorp is possibly number two or three in the non-bank mortgage market and he expects that to increase.
“We are conscious we are a small part of the mortgage market, so what we see isn’t necessarily representative of the wider market.”
Having said that, Moody says from Basecorp’s perspective there is a lot more property market activity.
“Investors are certainly back in the market in higher numbers than what they were two to three years ago, there is more property trading, a bit more pre- development activity, buying of vacant land, and the attractiveness of commercial property is rising again as interest rates have come down and some of the cap rates have stabilised.”
| « Rising sophisticated cyber attacks aimed at advisers |
Special Offers
Comments from our readers
No comments yet
Sign In to add your comment
|
|
Printable version |
|
Email to a friend |
