When you want to buy a home of your own, but most purchasers typically do not have sufficient funds to make an outright purchase. It would be great to have that kind of money as spare change, but most of us don’t. While a lots of purchasers will look towards banks and other conventional lending institutions to obtain the necessary funds, they can sometimes find their loan application rejected for many different reasons.

This usually happens when the buyer does not have the minimum required deposit to make them eligible for the mortgage or if the purchaser has previously defaulted on a previous loan. In such cases, the purchaser has another option for funding the purchase of his new home and that is to take a loan with the seller. This is called vendor financing the deposit, in other words - vendor finance.

How Does Vendor Financing Work?

To help us understand how this deal works, we will draw an example from a vendor who may want to sell their property to a potential buyer. If the purchaser does not have the capacity to buy the property outright, he or she may agree with the vendor that the purchase price will be based on a set of terms and conditions that both the new buyer and vendor agrees to be fair.

More often then not, the contract of sale will specify that the title to the home will remain with the vendor and will only transfer when full payment of the amount outstanding is paid by the purchaser.

Normally, purchasers can expect to get vendor financing of up to 70% of the purchase price. It is very similar to lay-by purchase from a appliance store. The difference with vendor financing is that the buyer can actually live in the home while making the repayments to the owner of the property.

It is pretty normal for an investor will purchase the home at a discount market value and negotiate with a home buyer who will purchase it at above market rates. The whole idea is that the investor will earn a little extra money from interest and the higher sell price. The biggest issue we see with this is the fact that most investors don’t know how to buy houses at a big enough discount to sell the property at a fair market price to the new purchaser.

This is commonly known as finance wrapping where all the homes expenditures are passed on to the buyer. This can be compared to charges or mortgages as forms of securities used by banks. Discharge of these charges or reconveyance of these mortgages depends on the repayment of any outstanding loans. Just like in these two, the interests of the parties are protected by well laid out legal instruments including caveats and inhibitions and right to sue on covenant. Just make sure you have a good solicitor who can find clauses in these instalment contracts, to make sure you are not going to be disadvantaged in any way.

We always prefer to see this kind of purchase happen directly with a seller and new buyer so that investors are not even in the middle of the deal. It just means there is more money left for the new buyer and the seller. For the new buyer, they can now look to add value to the home so that they can achieve equity much faster, and look to pay out the seller much quicker. Just make sure you don’t skip the legal aspects and you will find yourself in a great deal.