Richard Esteb

How I work

Solo brokerage. Replies to your own email and your own phone. The work I take on is whatever sits inside the AFG residential panel that I can put real attention on — most of my time goes into self-employed structures, investor portfolios, and borrowers whose income or liabilities fall outside the bank-calculator template.

I publish the calculator publicly because the lender-specific spread is genuinely hard to see anywhere else, and because the conversation goes faster when you arrive with a sense of the shape of your own panel. The calculator is the exact same methodology I run before lodgement — assessment rate per lender, DTI cap, HEM, income shading by employment type and frequency, liability calculation by lender rule. The deal-binding number on your file gets confirmed against the actual lender's servicing calculator before submission.

Where I focus

• Self-employed home loans. Sole-trader, company, and trust structures. BAS-derived income, add-back categories, multi-entity flow-through. The widest spread on the panel sits here, so the broker work matters most.
• Investor lending. Single-property and portfolio. LVR strategy, debt-recycling structures, interest-only versus principal-and-interest decisions, lender appetite for high-density and regional stock.
• Complex PAYG income. Bonuses, commissions, allowances, second jobs, recent role changes — the cases where bank tools shade income hardest and lender variance is widest.
• First home buyers. Queensland First Home Owner Grant, First Home Guarantee, stamp duty concessions, family pledge / guarantor structures where they make sense.
• Refinance. Including cashback assessment with honest treatment of clawback risk, switching costs, and retention-rate negotiation as an alternative to switching.

Geography

Gold Coast and broader Queensland. Most of the work runs remotely — phone, email, electronic document signing — so location doesn't constrain who I can work with. If you'd rather meet in person, we can arrange that on the Coast.