Buying a House You Have Never Stood In, Because the Posting Says You Are Moving

An offer from a serving member who has never walked through the house is not a red flag. That is a Tuesday.

Members get posted. The posting lands, the move happens whether the market is ready or not, and plenty of them buy in the city they are about to live in rather than the one they are in now. Victoria to north Queensland. Queensland to Perth. Whichever way the orders point.

So the buyer is interstate before they are a buyer. Inspections happen on somebody else's phone camera. Building and pest gets booked around a member who cannot take a call between nine and five, because he is at sea, or in the field, or on a course with his phone in a locker.

The lending on these files is usually fine. It is the calendar that breaks.

Here is the part that nobody explains properly. A finance clause assumes the buyer can answer a question on the day you ask it.

That assumption is wrong for a lot of serving members and it is wrong in a way that costs money. Ask for one more document on a Friday afternoon and you might hear nothing until the middle of the following week. Not slack. He physically does not have the phone.

A standard finance clause is often 14 or 21 days depending on the state and what was negotiated. Two unanswered questions inside that window and you are asking the vendor for an extension on a file that was never actually in trouble.

Vendors grant extensions. They also use them to start taking other offers seriously.

So the fix is boring and it works. Do the paperwork before you need it.

Get the full document pack to your broker before you make an offer, not after. Payslips, the full pay summary with every allowance line on it, bank statements, ID, liabilities. If you are on a posting where you will be uncontactable for a stretch, say so up front and give the dates.

Nominate a second contact. A partner who can sign, send and answer questions, with written authority in place so the lender will actually talk to them. This single step saves more defence files than anything else on this list.

Ask for a longer finance clause than the agent suggests. You are not being difficult. You are describing your actual availability, and an agent who understands that will take a cleaner offer with a 28 day clause over a tight one that falls over.

And get the pre approval done before you are house hunting on a four day house hunting trip, because that trip is not the time to discover that the number you had in your head came from somewhere else.

Now the pay, which is where most of the trouble starts.

A defence payslip is a base salary with a stack of separate allowance lines sitting on top of it. Service allowance, and depending on the role and the posting, a handful of others. Some of those lines are permanent features of the pay. Some of them exist because of where this member is right now and will stop when the posting does.

Lenders read those lines very differently from each other. Same payslip, same member, genuinely different borrowing capacity depending on who assesses it, because each lender has its own policy on which allowance lines it will accept, how much of them it will count, and what evidence it wants.

We are not going to map out which lines survive a servicing assessment here. The answer moves by lender and by posting, and a general article is the wrong place to guess at it.

What we will say is this. If the number you were given came off a two minute phone call, there is a reasonable chance your pay was read as a civilian salary with an unusual postcode.

And when that gets read wrong it does not land on the agent or the lender. A member gets given a number, believes it, stops looking at anything above it, and nobody ever rings back to say the number was wrong.

The flip side is also true and it is the better half of the story. A member who has been told they can borrow less than they expected has usually been assessed by one lender, under one policy, on one reading of their pay. One no is one lender's policy. It is not a verdict on the file.

There are also three things specific to defence that sit outside the loan itself, and they are worth knowing about before you sign a contract rather than after.

The Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme, DHOAS, is a subsidy on the interest you pay on an eligible home loan. It is not a loan and it is not something a broker grants you. Your eligibility and the amount are determined by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, based on your service. Vairo Finance is not a DHOAS loan provider. If you want to know where you stand, go to dhoas.gov.au or call 1300 434 627, and do it early, because the subsidy certificate is a step in its own right rather than something that gets sorted at settlement.

The Home Purchase Assistance Scheme, HPAS, and the Home Purchase or Sale Expenses Allowance, HPSEA, are different things again, with their own rules and their own eligibility sitting with Defence. They deal with costs around buying and selling rather than the loan. Plenty of members have never heard of the second one at all, which is a shame, because the timing of when you buy or sell against a posting can matter to it.

None of those three change what a lender will lend you. They change what the whole move costs you, which is a different number and often a bigger one.

The last piece is settlement timing against the posting date, and this is the one people get caught by.

Settlement is not a date you fully control. It moves for probate, for a vendor's own purchase, for a bank that wants one more document on the morning of. If your removal is booked for the week you are due to settle, you need a plan for the version where settlement slips by a fortnight.

Sometimes that plan is a longer settlement from the start. Sometimes it is a rental for six weeks and a storage unit, which is annoying and cheap compared to the alternative. Either way it is a decision to make in advance, not a problem to solve while a truck is sitting out the front.

Buying a house you have never stood in is not reckless when you are posted. It is the normal way this works, and it goes fine when the file is built around how your week actually runs rather than how a nine to five week runs.

If you have bought on a posting before, what was the thing that nearly derailed it? It is almost never the valuation.