FAQs

We built Conductor to bridge the gap between financial planning and doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

As part of our platform, we at Conductor are your mortgage broker and overall project manager. Buying property involves getting insurance and legal advice too—and we have partnered with excellent insurance brokers and lawyers and seamlessly integrated their services with ours to make life easy for you. (You can also BYO advisors and we’ll be happy to work with them.)

Who is our service for?

  • We’ll help you determine your budget and get lending pre-approved so you've got peace of mind. We’ll then help you think through the pros and cons of particular properties you’re viewing.

    Once you find a property you’re keen on, we’ll help you do due diligence. That means we’ll help you engage our insurance broker partner or your BYO one to apply for insurance on your behalf, and help you understand property risks like flooding and structural soundness. We'll also help you engage our legal partner or your BYO one to advise you on the legal risks.

    Once you’re comfortable the property is sound, we’ll help you make an offer and negotiate the deal, working with your lawyer. Once you’ve got a signed purchase agreement, we’ll help you get final lending approval, optimally structure your loan, and walk you right through to getting the keys. We’ll also help you put together a maintenance plan.

  • We’ll help you determine your strategy on selling or buying first, and what conditions to put on both your sale and purchase. We’ll then help you engage a real estate agent (or you can BYO) to sell your property and help you manage the relationship with them.

    In parallel, we’ll help you determine your budget and get any additional lending required pre-approved so you have peace of mind. We’ll then help you think through the pros and cons of particular properties you’re viewing.

    Once you find a property you’re keen on, we’ll help you do due diligence. That means we’ll help you engage our insurance broker partner or your BYO one to apply for insurance on your behalf, and help you understand property risks like flooding and structural soundness. We'll also help you engage our legal partner or your BYO one to advise you on the legal risks.

    Once you’re comfortable the property is sound, we’ll help you make an offer and negotiate the deal working with your lawyer. Once you’ve got a signed purchase agreement, we’ll help you get final lending approval, optimally structure your loan, and walk you right through to getting the keys.

  • We’ll help you determine your return expectations and property selection criteria. We’ll then help you get lending pre-approved so you have peace of mind. We’ll then help you think through the pros and cons of particular properties you’re viewing.

    Once you find a property you’re keen on, we’ll help you do due diligence. That means we’ll help you engage our insurance broker partner or your BYO one to apply for insurance on your behalf, and help you understand property risks like flooding and structural soundness. We'll also help you engage our legal partner or your BYO one to advise you on the legal risks. We can also help you engage a real estate agent to give you an appraisal to better understand the rent it might generate.

    Once you’re comfortable with the investment proposition, we’ll help you make an offer and negotiate the deal, working with your lawyer. Once you’ve got a signed agreement, we’ll help you get final lending approval, optimally structure your loan, and walk you right through to getting the keys. We’ll also give you general guidance on running rental properties sustainably and profitably (from our own experience).

  • We’ll analyse your current loan structure and identify how we can help you achieve your goals, whether that’s reduce your interest costs based on your expected future income and expenses, or creating additional flexibility.

    If you’re looking to borrow more, we’ll help you get additional lending approved and optimally structured.

    We’ll also help you navigate changing interest rates, advise you on the options available to best suit your goals, and help you negotiate the best deals we can.

  • Co-ownership is a growing trend, but it’s still not common. It’s also an area with some of the largest differences between the lenders, both in how they assess applicants and the rates you might quality for.

    We’ll help you understand firstly whether you have the option to purchase without co-ownership. Where co-ownership is appropriate, we’ll help you and your potential co-owners engage our legal partner or your BYO one to advise you on setting up a robust agreement on how the arrangement will work, including how and when the property can be sold.

    We’ll then help you buy in the same way as explained for the services above - helping you evaluate properties, do due diligence, helping you to engage an insurance broker and lawyer, make offers, negotiate and agree on the deal, finalise your lending, right through to getting the keys.

Other Questions

  • Yes! We’re a mortgage broker, accredited with a huge range of lenders in New Zealand, both banks and second tier lenders who help with out of the box situations.

    But the service we provide goes way beyond what a normal mortgage broker offers. We’ll project manage your house buying journey, including coordinating with all the other people involved like lawyers, insurance companies and brokers, accountants, and building inspectors. We also have a partnership with a law firm that means we can give you legal quotes in our platform, and we’ll do related financial analysis for you to understand things like when you might pay off your loan. And the best part is - it’s all included!

  • We've chosen to partner with Goodwill Law, because they're forward-thinking, tech-savvy, client-focused, and excellent legal minds.

    Our services are seamlessly integrated, making life even easier for you. Our partnership also means we can get you preliminary quotes for their services directly through our platform, and their pricing is some of the most cost-competitive in the market.

    You can also BYO your own lawyer, and we'll be happy to work with them, but the experience may not be as seamless as working with our partner. Goodwill Law

  • We've chosen to partner with the team of Jaco and Riana Munnik from FG Link, because they're veterans of the insurance industry, and provide first-class insurance advice on the insurance you need to buy a home. They're accredited with a wide range of New Zealand's insurance companies, and the best part is that our services are seamlessly integrated, making life even easier for you.

    You can also BYO your own insurance broker or direct insurer, and we'll be happy to work with them, but the experience may not be as seamless as working with our partners, Jaco and Riana Munnik.

  • Lots of websites have ‘borrowing calculators’ - but they usually only work for simple situations. What if you’re buying with friends and family? Selling and buying? Buying an investment property? Most other calculators can't handle these situations properly and accurately.

    Why can we do it? Because we’ve custom built a credit decisioning engine which simulates how lenders assess your application. Of course, in the estimation process we ask you a subset of the questions a lender does, so we use some assumptions - and then we’ll help you refine your estimate as a next step.

  • If you’re still on the hunt for your house, we’ll usually help you get pre-approval because it gives you peace of mind on what you’ll be able to borrow, and sets you up for making competitive offers on property.

    If you’ve a house in mind, then we’ll help you get the deal across the line, including getting the specific house approved by the lender.

  • Like other mortgage brokers we get paid by the lender when you take out a loan based on our advice. Mortgage broking is heavily regulated (with multi-million dollar fines on the line), and we follow a careful and methodical advice process to advise you on the best options that suit your circumstances.

    The real difference with us is that we’re re-investing in building best-in-industry tools to help Kiwi's plan and live the life they want. As a client of ours, you'll get early access to these tools as they become available.

  • Yes! Conductor's service is free, though you'll still need to pay for legal advice, pay insurance premiums, and pay your mortgage.

    The one exception where Conductor might charge you is if we help you get a loan and you pay it back or move banks (without our help) within 27 months. In that case we have to repay the bank what we got paid. We might then charge you to recover our costs. Moving banks this quickly often won’t be in your best interests anyway though (having to pay break fees or repay cash back for example), so it’s fairly niche.

    Like all registered financial advisors, we’ll give you full information on all of this in advance and it’s totally up to you whether you’d like to use our service.

  • Three reasons...

    First, our custom software saves you a lot of time and hassle compared with most brokers.

    Second, we go way beyond what a regular mortgage broker provides, project managing the overall buying journey for you and helping you to engage the other advisors you need. We also do additional financial analysis for you, for example on when you could be debt free. We do all of this at no additional cost (see above).

    Third, our team has developed our own custom built credit engine that simulates how the banks make lending decisions. To build this, we've probably delved deeper into the way lenders assess loans than nearly any mortgage broker.

  • You can, but then you have to do all the work yourself, and you don’t get all the other services we offer you for free (see above).

    Without deep knowledge of the lending market, you’re also at risk of not getting the best deal and structure to suit your circumstances. We have a deep working knowledge of the products available in the market across the banks - and you might not realise that banks do differ substantially in what they offer and their fine print. It goes well beyond interest rates.

  • The personal information you enter in Conductor is really personal, and it’s really important we keep it safe. That’s why we securely store your data.

    We continuously implement and update security measures to help protect your information.

    Richard Hosking, our platform builder (see About us) has experience working within banks on security software, including in fraud detection. For more information, please check out our Privacy Policy

  • We’ve designed-in all the guidance into our platform experience so that you get the advice you need when you need it, contextualised by your goals. If you want general guidance on how the property market, borrowing and investing works, feel free to book a call with Richie your mortgage broker or go see our friends at Realtor.co.nz who produce excellent guides.

Why choose Conductor?

  • Access to our all-in-one digital platform for maximum speed, clarity and ease

  • Better mortgage interest rates (where we can get them) to save you money in the long term

  • Expert advice on life planning more holistically - considering your wider goals

  • End-to-end support throughout the journey - 24/7