Renovate the house,
not the mortgage.Home improvement loans in Perth, arranged by brokers who will tell you when a personal loan is the wrong tool.

No. A home improvement loan through Yes Loans is an unsecured personal loan, so it is assessed on your income, your commitments and your credit conduct rather than on what your property is worth. Equity is a home loan question. If you bought recently, or values have moved against you, that closes the mortgage route and does not close this one.

Yes. The loan is not secured against the property, so you do not have to own it. Tenants finance air conditioning, appliances, furniture and window coverings this way regularly. Get your landlord's written consent before anything is fixed to the building, because the debt is yours whatever happens to the tenancy.

Sometimes, and it depends on the size of the job rather than on the rate. A home loan carries the lower rate and stretches the debt over your remaining mortgage term, so a five year kitchen can end up being paid for over twenty five years and cost considerably more in total. A personal loan costs more per year and ends when the project does. Ask for the total cost of both over the life of the debt, not the rate on both. We will do that comparison with you even when it sends you back to your own bank.

A construction loan is secured against your property and pays out in stages as the build progresses, with interest charged only on what has been drawn. It needs approved plans, a building permit and a fixed price contract with a registered builder before it is approved at all. A renovation loan in the sense most people mean it is an unsecured personal loan: one lump sum into your account on settlement, no plans, no valuation, and you pay whoever you like whenever the invoice arrives.

Not for the loan itself. An unsecured personal loan is assessed on you rather than on the works, so no permit is needed to get the money. You may well need one for the work, though. In Western Australia a building permit is required for most structural work, and that is a separate conversation with your local government that is worth starting before you commit to a start date.

For small jobs, yes. In Western Australia, once a building permit is required and the estimated value of the building work is over $20,000, the work has to be carried out by a registered building contractor or by you under an owner-builder approval from the Building Services Board. The threshold is $50,000 for sheds, carports and private garages. You cannot split one job into separate parts each under the threshold to get around it, and owner-builder approvals are currently taking around six weeks to process, so factor that into the timeline rather than the budget.

Yes. The money lands in your account as one payment and there is no restriction on how you spend it, so timber, tiles, paint, a skip bin and hire equipment are all fine. That flexibility is the main practical advantage an unsecured loan has over a construction loan, where the lender pays a builder against a schedule.

The minimum loan amount is $5,000. There is no published maximum, because what you can borrow above that is set by the lender against your income and your existing commitments rather than by us. Our loan calculator is the quickest way to sanity check a figure before you talk to anybody, and the estimator on this page will show you what a given amount costs a week. The same personal loans are used for weddings, travel and medical costs, so if the renovation is one of several things you are planning, tell your broker about all of them at once.

Loan terms run up to 7 years. A longer term lowers the weekly repayment and raises the total interest, and the sensible test is whether the term outlives the thing you are buying. Seven years is reasonable on a bathroom and is a long time to still be paying for a dishwasher.

The interest rate is fixed for the term of the loan, so no interest rate rises. That is one of the real differences between this and putting the work on a variable rate mortgage, where the repayment can move under you for the next two decades.

Often no. A deposit may be required depending on previous credit history or the value of the goods being financed. Putting some of your own money in lowers what you borrow and widens the number of lenders willing to look at the file, which matters most on a thin credit file or a rebuild, so it is worth modelling both on the estimator above.

Often, yes. Paid or unpaid defaults, a discharged bankruptcy or a thin file change the rate and sometimes the amount rather than closing the door. The honest position is that it costs more, and your broker will tell you what it costs before you apply rather than after.

Yes, we have low doc loans available to self-employed and contractors that have an ABN number. The assessment runs on BAS and bank statements rather than on two full years of tax returns, so the paperwork is different rather than heavier.

Yes, but the loan term can only be for the remaining term on your visa. If the visa is for 5 years and you have already been here for 24 months, then the maximum loan term is 3 years. It is worth knowing before you plan a budget around a seven year repayment.

Yes, and check what the state will give you first. The WA Residential Battery Scheme offers a rebate of up to $1,300 for Synergy customers and up to $3,800 for Horizon Power customers, plus a no interest loan of up to $10,000 for households with a combined income under $210,000. Eligibility conditions apply, including taking part in a Virtual Power Plant. No broker can beat no interest, so take that first and come to us for whatever it does not cover.

Yes. Get the fencing, the paving, the pump and the power quoted alongside the shell before you decide what to borrow, because those four are rarely in the pool builder's number and they are not optional. In Western Australia a pool needs its own permit and a compliant barrier, though pools and fencing are treated as incidental structures for the purposes of owner-builder licensing.

Getting your rate here will not affect your credit score. One application through us reaches the whole panel, so you avoid collecting a separate credit enquiry for every lender you would otherwise have approached one by one. The number of enquiries you make does affect your score, so that matters more than most people realise.

The online application takes minutes and a straightforward file is usually assessed the same day or the next. A Yes Loans quote is valid for 30 days, and pre-approval is valid for 30 days as well, which is deliberately about the same window a builder will give you on a quote.

Yes Loans does not set them. Fees are the lender's, they vary across the panel, and any figure we published here would be a promise we are not in a position to keep. What we will do is put the lender's own fee schedule in front of you in writing, alongside the rate and the term, before you commit to anything. If a fee makes a cheaper looking loan the more expensive one, that is exactly the kind of thing a broker is for.

Yes, and it is the step people skip. Most home and contents policies limit or exclude cover while structural work is going on, and an unoccupied house during a renovation is treated differently again. Call your insurer before the first trade turns up rather than after something goes wrong. We arrange insurance as well, so it does not have to be a separate errand.

Often, yes, and it is one of the more sensible reasons to borrow. Card interest on a half finished bathroom is usually the most expensive money in the house. Bringing it together with what you still need to spend gives you one fixed repayment and a date it ends, rather than a balance that moves every month.

In most cases yes, and whether it costs you anything depends on the lender. Ask about early repayment before you sign rather than afterwards, particularly if you expect a bonus, a tax return or a sale to let you clear it ahead of schedule. Your broker will check that clause as a matter of course.