How long should it take to refinance to another bank on Average?

Just going through the process of refinancing to a cheaper interest rate. Made 1st initial contact with Broker mid Dec. & up until now still no Unconditional Approval. I accept Christmas is in there so take 2 weeks off that. Is this normal to take this long as I have never used a Broker before ever.

 

Generally approval would be 2 days to a week after it has been lodged. But if there are extra questions raised it may take longer.

 

Depending on the lender it can take ages - smaller lenders with cheap rates, particularly. However if it was lodged mid December it should be approved by now. Which lender?

Have you asked your broker why it's taking so long? Are they giving you regular updates?

 

This all depends on the lender. Your broker should be able to give you an update.

Sometimes there's a delay for some reason or another.

E.g. ANZ were at like ~12 business days to simply look at a file in December.

 

Exactly. and when they take x days to look at a file, if they require anything in terms of further documents, questions or valuations - the file goes back into a queue and has to wait all over again.

Very common to have refinance approvals to take weeks if the lender in particular is very popular at that time, there's been cases where lenders have taken 3-4 weeks just to review a file just to get to a conditional approval, let alone formally approved.

 

Quicker direct in most cases.

 

Hey Thanks for reply guys.
Well you wouldn't read about it,an hour after writing the above, Broker rang me with the good news of Formal Approval.
Lender is AMP, so sounds about right with smaller lenders then.
As for Broker he did keep me in informed with regular updates, but even he had little information to give.

 

I did an ANZ in Jan which was unconditional in under a week.

 

They're usually one of the speedier lenders - were just the pick of the bunch re pricing in Nov, leading to a spike in apps in December (as well as a large number of OTP settlements going through ANZ apparently happening before sunset clauses ended on Dec 31).