In this current low interest climate, it's no surprise that many of us have been thinking about refinancing our mortgage loan. After all, who doesn't like to save more money?
While it's true that a good property investment depends heavily on the entry and exit price, the interest you are paying for your mortgage loan is equally important. Most of the time, property price appreciation takes years or even decades to materialise. Hence, you need to have certain holding power before you can expect to make a decent profit from your property investment. In the meantime, a mortgage loan with high interest rate is your worst enemy as it will slowly erode your earnings.
For comparison sake, a mortgage loan with 1.5% interest rate over a 30 years tenure will cause you $910 interest in your monthly payment while a mortgage loan with 1.7% interest rate over the same tenure will cause you $1032 interest. Just a 0.2% interest rate difference will cause you more than $100 in your monthly interest and you could imagine how much that would snowball over years or decades.
(Source: PropertyGuru)
(Source: PropertyGuru)
With that in mind, I thought it's worthwhile for me to relook into mortgage loans and hence begin the journey on what's the best way for me to refinance my mortgage loan.
I have certain criteria in my search. Firstly, I wanted a platform which is bank-agnostic in some sense and allows me to quickly search through all the different loan packages from the different banks. Secondly, I do not want any hard sell by any agents and hope to get some objective advice as much as possible.
Seeing that PropertyGuru has a service called PropertyGuru Finance which aims to help people find the perfect home loan, I decided to give it a try.
Since I am looking into refinancing my home loan, I clicked on "I want to refinance my loan".
(Source: PropertyGuru)
I didn't want to speak to anyone yet at this point of time so I decided to see for myself what are the latest rates that the website has to offer.
I am pleasantly surprised by the large number of banks on their platform. You see many familiar names such as Standard Chartered Bank, UOB, DBS, OCBC etc. There are more than 10 banks on their list so I would say that it's quite a comprehensive list.
(Source: PropertyGuru)
Next, I keyed in the details of my loan to see what kind of loans the platform offers in the search results.
And I'm quite happy with what I have seen. Not only do they find home loans for your needs, they even have the savings information for each of the loans available in the results so that you can instantly have a clear idea on how much savings are you expected to have if you were to switch over to the loan. At one glance, I could also quickly gather important information such as lock in period, interest rate etc.
That's certainly impressive to me. After shortlisting a few loans which might be applicable to my circumstances, I decided to click on "Enquire Now" to have some human interactions and speak to someone.
(Source: PropertyGuru)
Upon clicking on "Enquire Now", I was brought to a page to key in my personal details. To be honest, I actually chuckled when I saw a footnote which says that an advisor will call me within 3 hours. I submitted the form around 6:30pm and I was pretty sure that there's no way someone would call me within 3 hours since it's after office hours.
(Source: PropertyGuru)
And I was wrong.
An advisor actually did reach out to me at 7:30pm!! I'm really surprised that someone actually took the effort to contact me within 3 hours when I only submitted the enquiry after office hours.
I picked up the call and was secretly hoping that this will not be another of you-know hard sell call sessions that you have to face ever so often on a daily basis. I took a deep breath and then begin to explain my current mortgage situation to the advisor and enquire about a few mortgage plans that I'm interested in.
It then turns out that I'm not actually really suitable to refinance my mortgage loan for now. Firstly, my private property is still under construction and has not TOP. Secondly, my existing loan has a really attractive interest rate as it's done a few years back when nobody was expecting SIBOR rate to be where it is now so there's practically no other loans in the market right now which can match such interest rate. You might think that the advisor could have already lost interest at this point of time since there is no potential sales right?
Again, I was wrong.
The advisor was really patient in explaining the situation, difference in the various loans I'm looking into and also shared what are some of the actions that I could undertake when my private property has TOPed. That went on for another good 10-15 minutes. Bear in mind this is probably his family or resting time since it's 7 plus in the evening. There is no potential sales in this call yet the advisor is willing to spend more time with me. I have to say this is definitely very high professionalism. At the end of the call, the advisor shared with me a link with a lot of useful information, tools and articles for home mortgage loans.
While I did not get to refinance my home loan as what I have originally intended to, I must say that I am very pleased with my whole experience with PropertyGuru Finance. It certainly lives up to its expectations. In case you are thinking whatever I am encountering so far is probably something that any other broker can offer, I have to say that's not all that PropertyGuru Finance is offering. There are more.
(Source: PropertyGuru)
PropertyGuru Finance also offers mortgage monitoring service and bespoke home loan strategies. As you know, refinancing mortgage loans is an ongoing process in your homeownership journey. There are good chances you will probably refinance your mortgage loan a few times in this journey to make best use of the interest rates. I don't think any of us would like to be in the position of constantly monitoring the mortgage loan market as this is clearly not our day job or the top few priorities in our life. However, we still want to make best use of what's being offered in the market. We just don't want to spend the effort.
This is where PropertyGuru Finance fits the bill. By utilising technology and data coupled together with a team of experts, they take the heavy lifting off you and will be the one who monitor the market daily and notify you whenever a suitable opportunity (in your specific circumstances) to refinance appears. In this case, you will be sure to be ahead in the market without having to spend too much time and effort yourself. I can't think of any better way.
At this point of time, you might be thinking if any charges are needed for all these services. Well, no. You do not need to pay for these services. PropertyGuru Finance gets their compensation by receiving a small referral fee from the bank which you accepted the loan from. Hence, there is no need to charge more for such services to make the business model sustainable.
I'm genuinely impressed with what PropertyGuru Finance has to offer and I strongly suggest you give it a try yourself. SORA will be replacing Sibor as the main interest rate benchmark. If your current mortgage loan is based on Sibor, you will likely run into situations of having to refinance your mortgage loan in the coming years. And I think there is no better time than now to start considering refinancing your mortgage loan via PropertyGuru Finance.
Don't just take my word for it. Try it out yourself here.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links for PropertyGuru Finance. However, all opinions expressed are my own.
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