RAC Finance joins AFG panel with $10m no-presale WA development loan

AFG added RAC Finance to its commercial lending panel on 26 October, giving Western Australian brokers a no-presale option for development loans of up to $10m. The facility covers metropolitan Perth and selected parts of the state’s South West, and targets projects that cannot meet the pre-sale quotas mainstream panel lenders typically demand before committing funds. Mortgage Professional Australia reported the panel addition, and the detail below follows its coverage.

Why it matters

For developers and builders running a construction-funded project in WA, a pre-sale threshold is often the hardest condition to clear before a lender signs off, forcing a choice between delaying a start or discounting stock to lock in contracts early. A panel option that drops that requirement changes what a developer can greenlight on Monday: a site with a sound budget and build program no longer needs a signed-contract book to reach funding. Brokers gain a product to place clients who were previously knocked back by mainstream criteria, rather than losing the deal altogether or pushing the client toward higher-cost private debt. AFG’s general manager of industry and partnerships, Mark Hewitt, said development finance is a specialised area of lending and that every project differs, framing RAC Finance’s addition as covering a gap the panel’s existing lenders leave open for WA projects without full pre-sale coverage. Pre-sale conditions have been a live constraint on the eastern seaboard too: a NSW facility structured a guarantee specifically to substitute for signed pre-sale contracts, underlining that lenders nationally are building separate products around the same bottleneck rather than relaxing it across the board.

The numbers

The facility caps individual loans at $10m for eligible projects, confines eligibility to metropolitan Perth and selected parts of WA’s South West, and processes progress-claim payments within 48 hours, handled by a WA-based property finance team. RAC Finance’s general manager, Michael Patino, said the lender has been supporting local developers for more than 30 years, positioning the panel addition as an extension of an existing WA development-lending book rather than a new entrant testing the market.

What’s next

“For brokers, greater lender choice means more options for clients and more commercial opportunities,” Hewitt said. The addition does not touch planning or approval pathways: a project still needs its own development approval, whether through the relevant council, a Development Assessment Panel, or the WAPC, before any RAC Finance facility can settle. The $10m cap and the metropolitan Perth and South West footprint are fixed by the announcement; a project outside those areas, or needing a larger facility, falls outside this specific panel addition regardless of its pre-sale position. Brokers with WA development clients now have a documented, named option to raise where a pre-sale shortfall was the blocker, and developers weighing a build program against a thin pre-sale book have one more funding path to test before resizing or delaying a project. The practical next step for a broker is confirming a given site sits inside the metropolitan Perth or nominated South West footprint before quoting the product to a client, since the panel addition does not extend eligibility to the Pilbara, the Wheatbelt, or WA’s other regional markets. For a developer already holding a site and a build program but short on signed contracts, the next conversation is with a broker about whether this facility, rather than a discount-driven pre-sale campaign, is the faster path to a start date.