A real estate agent is not under any obligation to disclose any bids from other parties to you and vica versa.

However the real estate agent should advise all buyers that there are other interested parties and that your offer could be more or less then the other parties.

They don’t have to disclose figures as it is unfair to the other buyers.

In an auction though all offers are on the table on the day or night and all buyers get to know their competition.

Best of luck with the buying process

Thank you for your question and given the details you have presented it is nice to know that you do have options.

Firstly we will outline the assumptions we have made as they will provide the answer.

We are assuming you and your wife have no children, no personal loans and are looking to build a home to live in and therefore not an investment.

One suggestion would be to try and use the equity of your current loan by extending the loan balance or refinancing the loan.

If the value of the property is $220,000 then you can borrow up to 80% of the value of the property without having to pay mortgage insurance on the loan.

80% of $220,000 is $176,000 so this will provide you with an additional $56,000 in equity based on your existing loan. If you then wanted to build a new home you could purchase land and constructions costs of around $380,000 and use the $82,000 for the 20% or so deposit to build the new home.

This would mean the new loan is approx $300,000.

So depending on which house you live in will determine what taxation advantages you can obtain and we suggest you meet for your accountant to discuss the best way forward in this regard.

In terms of the loan package we suggest you look at an interest only loan to start with as long as it provides you with the flexibility of being able to make additional repayments at any time to reduce your principal and monthly interest commitment.

Have a look through our website for the definitions of features of loans that maybe able to assist you.

When a home loan provider assesses a loan they most definitely will take into consideration the conduct of any of your loans and your repayment history. Obviously making payments on time or additional repayments will be a positive for you.

As we stated in the beginning we have made some assumptions to provide this answer. For more specific details we suggest you contact and experienced home loan expert to help you understand exactly what you can achieve – or if you would like to click on the talk to a home loan advisor through this website we can arrange for a suitably experienced home loan expert to contact you.

Thank you again for your question and best wishes.