Firstmac’s Alt-Doc Loans Start at 6.99% at 70% LVR on Six Months of BAS. The Harder File Note Is Now Which Alt-Doc Lender, Not Whether

What Firstmac actually launched

Firstmac’s own release, published 22 October 2026, describes an alt-doc loan for established self-employed borrowers, open to both owner-occupiers and investors. Rates start at 6.99% for an owner-occupied principal-and-interest loan at 70% LVR. Borrowers can take variable or fixed, principal and interest or interest-only, with an optional offset account. There is a low application fee and no ongoing monthly fee.

The entry conditions are the part to commit to memory. Firstmac asks for at least two years operating the business, a strong credit profile, and income demonstrated through six months of lodged ATO Business Activity Statements.

Two things the release does not state: the maximum LVR and the minimum or maximum loan size. The 70% figure is attached to the starting rate, not published as a ceiling. Confirm both with Firstmac before you quote a deposit requirement or a loan amount to a client.

Firstmac chief commercial officer Marie Mortimer drew the target narrowly. “We’re targeting established, high-quality self-employed customers,” she said in the release, noting that these borrowers “can find themselves paying substantially-higher interest rates” and that Firstmac is “not looking to compete across the entire alt-doc market” but is aiming at “the premium end, where borrowers have strong credit credentials”. On what it offers brokers, she was plain: “For brokers, it’s about having another competitive option for a good customer.”

Trade coverage adds the funding and strategy picture. MPA reported that the loans are funded through Firstmac’s Eagle RMBS program, separate from the Benchmark program behind its prime book, and that Firstmac manages $23 billion in residential mortgages. Mortimer told MPA the design is deliberately contained — “by keeping it quite narrow and having quite a simple assessment process” — and that “we’ll never say never, but for now we think that there’s a good market with just this segment of it.”

Why the self-employed book keeps drifting to non-banks

The rate backdrop is doing some of this. The RBA’s cash rate target sits at 4.60%, effective 30 September 2026 — the fourth 25 basis point increase of the year, following rises on 4 February to 3.85%, 18 March to 4.10% and 6 May to 4.35%, with no change at the June and August decisions. Australian Broker’s report on the Firstmac launch tied the move to tighter bank serviceability rules pushing more self-employed borrowers toward non-banks.

But serviceability policy is only half of it, and brokers know the other half better than anyone. A PAYG client’s income arrives in exactly the shape a bank’s assessment process was designed around: two payslips, a predictable base, a YTD figure that reconciles. A self-employed client’s income does not. It is seasonal, lumpy, run through an entity, reduced by legitimate depreciation and one-off expenses, and often deliberately structured for tax rather than for a credit assessor. Nothing about that makes the client a worse risk. It makes them a worse fit for a process built on payslips.

What is worth noticing is that the drift is not all one way. The same Broker Daily policy round-up for 1–8 October recorded Bank of Sydney removing the company guarantee requirement for consumer-purpose loans to self-employed borrowers using a corporate entity, and allowing all depreciation in the most recent tax return to be added back for SME servicing, subject to credit assessment. For a client with current financials, a change like that can reopen a full-doc path you had already written off. The lesson is unglamorous: an alt-doc recommendation made on a mental model of lender policy from six months ago is a recommendation made on stale information.

The price gap narrowed, so the comparison moved

MPA reported that lenders it spoke to say the pricing gap between banks and alt-doc has narrowed substantially, and that this is squeezing margins. It also set out the company Firstmac is joining, naming Pepper Money, Bluestone, Resimac, ORDE Financial, Liberty, Thinktank and Brighten as established alt-doc lenders — seven names, with Firstmac making an eighth. On MPA’s reporting, Pepper Money says around a third of its customers use alt-doc options, and alt-doc is a core part of Resimac’s home loan range.

Sit with what that does to your file. When alt-doc was materially dearer than prime and only two or three lenders would look seriously at a BAS, a broker’s decision was close to binary: full-doc if the financials stack up, alt-doc if they do not, and the reasoning wrote itself. With a crowded shelf and a narrower premium, the decision stops being whether and becomes which — and “which” is a comparison, with a cost dimension, between lenders your client could plausibly be approved with.

A concrete illustration from this month. Firstmac’s starting rate is 6.99% for owner-occupied P&I at 70% LVR. Broker Daily’s 1–8 October round-up recorded Rate Money promoting its Evolve Easy Doc product from 6.99% for owner-occupied P&I up to 80% LVR, with no application fee, risk fee or LMI, available until 1 December, plus dollar-for-dollar refinancing for self-employed borrowers up to 80% LVR on loans to $2.5 million.

Where RG 273 lands on an alt-doc file

The best interests duty sits in Part 3-5A of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009, and ASIC’s guidance on it is Regulatory Guide 273, Mortgage brokers: Best interests duty, issued June 2020. Four paragraphs in that guide do most of the work on an alt-doc file, and they are worth reading rather than paraphrasing from memory.

RG 273.51 says ASIC generally expects the cost of a credit product — “such as interest rate, fees and charges and the size of repayments” — to be a factor brokers should prioritise. RG 273.54 goes further: a failure to consider cost and investigate the lowest cost options available “may suggest non-compliance”, and “any situation where a higher cost loan is recommended will need to be supported by evidence demonstrating why that recommendation is in the consumer’s best interests”. RG 273.56 adds the obvious counterweight, that the lowest interest rate is not necessarily the lowest cost option once offsets, redraw and annual or establishment fees are counted.

Then come the two paragraphs that matter most for self-employed work. RG 273.59 acknowledges that access to certain products may be limited by a consumer’s circumstances, including credit risk and desired loan amount. RG 273.60 states that “the credit policy, pricing practices and risk appetite of the credit provider may preclude some consumers from accessing the lowest cost products”. And RG 273.61 says that in those situations a broker should do two things: explain why the cheaper products are not available and the limitations involved with the available options, and “still consider the cost of the available options” where the application is reasonably likely to be approved.

This is general information about published guidance, not advice on your obligations. RG 273 runs to considerably more than these paragraphs, and how any of it applies to a given file turns on that file. Your licensee or aggregator compliance team is the right place to settle how your process should evidence a recommendation, and anything that reads as a genuine grey area is worth independent legal advice rather than a judgement call between appointments.

The document set is the real gate

Brokers tend to triage alt-doc clients on rate and LVR. The faster filter is usually the paperwork, because that is what cannot be negotiated late in the process.

Firstmac’s stated requirements — two years trading, strong credit, six months of lodged BAS — rule in and out quite a lot before anyone looks at a rate. Three common clients fall outside them:

• The client 14 months into an ABN. Trading history is a hard gate, not a soft preference. They need a lender whose published minimum they actually meet, or a different structure.
• The client whose BAS lodgements are behind. Six months of lodged BAS is a sequencing problem, not a credit problem. The first call is to their accountant, not to a lender, and getting that order right can save a fortnight.
• The client with a recent default or a strained credit file. A product explicitly aimed at the premium end is not where a near-prime file gets its best outcome, however good the rate looks on the sheet.

The practical habit worth building: confirm the document set and the trading-history minimum before you shortlist on price. It reorders the conversation with the client from “here is a rate” to “here is what we need in place, and here is what that opens up” — which is both a better client experience and a cleaner file.

The demand problem no product sheet fixes

There is a larger issue sitting behind all of this, and no lender launch solves it. Research from Bluestone, reported by Australian Broker on 22 September, surveyed more than 18,000 Australians and found that self-employed borrowers are actively seeking professional advice — just not from brokers. On that reporting, 62% of self-employed borrowers had paid for some kind of professional adviser in the previous 12 months, but only 10% of those surveyed had gone to a mortgage broker for assistance. Facing a complex financial situation, 36% said they would prefer to speak with a bank against 25% who would turn to a broker, and two-thirds said they would go directly to a bank or lender rather than a broker.

The awareness numbers in that research are the ones to dwell on: around 45% were unfamiliar with non-bank lenders, while 63% said they would consider one if it were presented to them. Separately, 68% were concerned lending conditions would tighten over the next year. These are a lender’s own survey figures as reported by one outlet rather than independently verified market data, so weigh them accordingly — but the direction is hard to argue with.

“But our research suggests many self-employed borrowers aren’t making it in front of the broker in the first place.” Tony MacRae, chief commercial officer, Bluestone, quoted in Australian Broker, 22 September 2026

Bluestone’s head of sales strategy and performance, Aaron Taylor, put the gap down to visibility: “One of the challenges is awareness; awareness of non-bank lenders remains relatively low.” The same reporting noted that three in four brokers had turned away at least one non-prime borrower in the previous 12 months — not all of them self-employed, but a useful measure of how much enquiry currently leaves the channel without an outcome.

Put the two halves together and the commercial reading is straightforward. The shelf of lenders willing to write a well-documented self-employed loan at a competitive rate is getting longer. The number of self-employed Australians who know that, and who think of a broker as the person to ask, is not keeping pace. That is a marketing and referral problem with a known answer: accountants and bookkeepers, who are already in front of these clients and already handling the BAS that the loan now turns on.

What to review this week

What to watch next

Three things worth tracking. First, whether the premium end of alt-doc keeps compressing — if the gap to prime narrows further, the cost comparison inside alt-doc becomes a more regular feature of your files, not an occasional one. Second, whether maximum LVRs and loan-size caps get published as the newer entrants settle in, since those are the figures that decide placement in practice. Third, whether full-doc servicing policy keeps loosening at the mutual and second-tier end, which would pull some of this volume back out of alt-doc altogether.

Mortimer told MPA that Firstmac is reviewing strategy in light of a slower market and recent government changes, including around investment lending and self-managed super fund borrowing. Appetite that was set in October may not be the appetite you are working with in March.