Personal name, trust, or company?

The structure question, honestly

If you've gone down a Reddit rabbit hole on property structures, you'll have seen everything from "always trust" to "always personal" with confident reasoning attached to each. The honest take is: it depends, and the math is genuinely close on most files. Three principles:

1. Negative gearing kills the trust case for most files. Australian discretionary trusts can't distribute losses to beneficiaries — losses sit in the trust and carry forward. If your property is cash-flow negative for the first 3-5 years (which most leveraged purchases are), the trust path forfeits the negative-gearing tax offset that's the whole point of the structure on paper. Personal name keeps the offset; trust accounts for it as a future-tax-asset only.
2. Trust wins when there's distribution flexibility AND positive gearing. If you have a spouse on a meaningfully lower marginal rate (e.g. you're 47%, they're 19% during parental leave or part-time work), distributing positive net income through a trust to them saves real tax. The math gets compelling — but only when the property is actually positive, and only while the rate gap exists.
3. Company is rarely the right answer for residential. The 25% flat rate looks attractive against 47%, but: (a) you need to extract via dividend, adding a tax event; (b) no CGT 50% discount on eventual sale (a huge cost on a long-held growth asset); (c) the lender panel for residential investor lending in a company is the narrowest of the three. There are reasons to use companies (development, cross-jurisdiction, very specific asset-protection structures) but for a single residential investment, it's almost always wrong.

What this calculator deliberately doesn't tell you

• Asset protection. Trusts and companies provide asset-protection layers personal name doesn't. If your career carries professional liability risk (medical, legal, building), the protection might be worth the borrowing capacity hit. Calculator can't price your specific risk.
• Land tax. Each state taxes ownership differently. Trusts often face higher land tax (no land tax-free threshold in some states); companies sit at company rates. On a $1M+ property in NSW or VIC, this can move the calc by thousands per year. Consult your state revenue office or your accountant.
• Lender panel access detail. "~80% of personal" is a heuristic. Specific lender appetite for trust lending varies by lender, by type of trust (discretionary vs unit vs hybrid), by trustee structure (individual vs corporate), and by whether the borrower has lender-history with that lender. The full panel-by-panel investigation is a broker conversation.
• Estate planning continuity. Trusts are easier to pass down through generations than personal-name property. If multi-generational wealth transfer is on the agenda, the trust path's case strengthens regardless of current-year tax math.
• Family law. Property held in a discretionary trust can be at-risk in family law settlements depending on circumstances. The structure isn't an asset-protection silver bullet against this.
• Setup and ongoing cost. Trust + corporate trustee structure: $1,500-3,000 setup, $2-4k/yr ongoing accounting. Company: similar. Personal: zero. On a small file, the ongoing cost can erode any tax saving the structure delivers.

The calculator is a screening tool. The structure decision is a deal-stage conversation with your accountant, where these things get weighed against your specific circumstances. We don't make it for you — but we do make sure you walk into that conversation with the math clear.

— Richard Esteb · Esteb & Co · ASIC Credit Rep #574071