Bluestone Home Loans, a specialist non-bank residential mortgage lender that exited the New Zealand market last year has been sold to Australian Stock Exchange-listed Challenger for $597 million.
The company has also now issued a question and answer sheet and told Bluestone clients: “Your loan with Bluestone Home Loans NZ, New Zealand Home Loans or Select Home Loans NZ will be migrated to Challenger Mortgage Management.”
Who is Challenger?
Challenger NZ HoldCo1 is a New Zealand-registered company ultimately 100% owned by Challenger which is the investment management firm listed on the Australian stock exchange. It’s this company that will operate Bluestone Mortgages NZ. While Bluestone Mortgages was never a New Zealand owned business (it was 60% American, 24% Cayman Islands, 7% Singapore and the rest various overseas entities) the new owner Challenger remains an overseas owner and the ownership spread with 53% Australian, 22% American, 15% Japanese, 5% British and the rest various entities.
Other Non-Bank Lenders
We also saw another non-bank lender Resimac Home Loans withdraw from New Zealand last year and so that leaves Liberty and Pepper being the main two Australian based non bank lenders offering long-term home loans.
There are also some New Zealand owned businesses in the same non-bank market offering the long-term loans being, Avanti Finance, Basecorp Finance and CMFL as the main options and excluding the credit unions and building societies.
In many cases mortgage advisers might use some of the short-term non-bank lenders if they think there is a good chance to refinance to a bank in the short to medium term, but that can be risky as you may end up with short term lending for longer than expected should things not go to plan.
