Lending holds up for Homeloans

Homeloans Limited yesterday said it expected to report a profit for the December 2009 half of between $4.2 million and $4.6 million, up from $2.6 million a year ago.

The mortgage manager reported a statutory net profit of $7.2 million in the year to June 2009, and a normalised net profit of $8.4 million.

Tim Holmes, executive chair of the firm, said yesterday that trading over the second half of calendar 2009 was much the same as in the first half, but said new lending volumes were only keeping pace with discharges.

Homeloans manages a mortgage book of around $5.5 billion.

Holmes said January was pretty strong, which is in contrast to the dive in new business levels reported by Australian Finance Group (though the latter is a mortgage aggregator).

Homeloans has worked out fresh funding and product terms with Advantedge the mortgage funder bought by National Australia Bank last year.