Securing a mortgate loan is the most important step in the home-buying process. However, choosing the most suitable mortgate loan can be one of the most stressful and important decisions in a persons life.
So I am going to share my experience in getting housing loan for my dream house, which I posted before in my personal blog, CherasVista.blogspot.com.
Getting loan for my property
One month after paid the booking fees, we finally made the decision to accept the offer from Public Bank. The process of getting housing is not easy task for new buyer like us. We spend quite a lot of times to meet with banker, agent to know more details about the available loan types in market now. We learned numerous of the “new terms” during the proccess such as conventional, semi-flexi and fully flexi, FEC, ZEC, NZEC, lock-in period, penalty, etc…Wow, not easy man.
Below is the offer details that I got from Public Bank, which we think as the best offer we got.
Rates: BLR-2.2 Whole Tenure
Loan Type: Semi flexi, Free Entry Cost (FEC)
Loan Tenure: 30 years
Lock In: 5 years from full release
Penalty: 3% of the balance of facility
Prepayment: Any amount. No notice required
Redraw facility: 2 days written notice
Min 5k & multiple of 1K
RM50 per transaction (heard this can request to waive
)
One request per month
Upfront fee: Bancruptcy search (75*2), Site Inspection (100), Stamping (20) = RM270
Advantages:
- Bank wellknown with efficiency (of course efficiency in chasing you to pay installment as well)
- The best rates being offer among HLB, Alliance, OCBC in terms of ZEC package.
- Semi flexi is more suitable for us because we are financial independent and we will equally pay everything for the house. Fully flexi feature might not useful for us because will be harder to maintain for both of us.
- Penalty is lower as it based on the outstanding amount by schedule, compare to other bank which is based on loan amount.
- No monthly maintainance fees to pay.
- Can use the extra money for investment instead of use it as prepayment. As the current housing loan rate(about 4%) is very low and any kind of investment can easily yield better return (>5%).
- If you selling your house in locking period and your house buyer gettting loan from Public bank, your penalty will be waived.
- The prepayment terms is straight forward, any amount will be treat as prepayment and redrawable.
- No need buy MRTA
Disadvantages:
- Have to pay upfront fee – RM270
- Withdrawal need to pay RM50, much more higher than other which normally charge RM10 only.
- Have to walk in to request withdraw money. Very far to go Taman Maluri branch and have to go during working hour too.
- Separate of the payment – Installment have to pay into saving account (or current account) and prepayment have to pay into loan account.
Summary of others offer I got:
Bank: Alliance
Rates: Year 1-5 BLR-2.05, Remaining BLR-2.1
Loan Type: Fully flexi, Free Entry Cost (FEC)
Bank: OCBC
Rates: BLR-2.4 Whole Tenure
Loan Type: Semi flexi, Non Zero Entry Cost (NZEC)
Bank: Hong Leong
Rates: BLR-2.15 Whole Tenure
Loan Type: Fully flexi, Free Entry Cost (FEC)
My thought:
Actually Standard Chartered bank can offer better rate but they declined my application due to SC not the panel bank of Cheras vista 3. I got to know other borrower able to get better rates from public bank, which is BLR-2.3(when we applied and was told will get this rate) even for lower loan amount. I tried to call the banker to ask for appeal but he is not very helpful to fight for better rate. So end up we didn’t do any appeal and just accept the offer. There might be some factor caused us unable to get our desire rate, but we tried our best already and we just accept it. No point getting mad because of extra few hundreds per year.
The most important thing is we got our dream house.
