berndbrot

When buying a house/flat in Oz, has anyone paid for all/part of the house from money held in UK account(s)?

How was transaction done?

If not, when did you transfer the old house funds, with who and at what cost (of the transaction)?

thanks in advance.

The S's

I think most people use a third party to transfer UK sterling to Aussy $ before buying a place. Companies like Tranzfers or HIFX get you a much better deal than your bank. Lots of threads on here about this, if you do a search on this your will no doubt find huge amounts of info on this.

Cheers Sean

moneypenny20

Yup. We left 99% of our money in UK as the cheque arrived in the solicitors bank the day we flew

We had no problem except me being thick. We found a house we wanted. Put an offer in, was accepted, I had mislaid our account details with both Hifx and Tranzfers so just rang First Direct (our bank) and asked for their exchange rate. It was obviously rubbish until we told them how much we wanted to transfer and suddenly we got a cracking rate Three days later the money was in the Aus bank, a bankers cheque produced and lo and behold, a house bought

Stuck

You can open a bank account in London with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, they transfer your funds and set up Oz bank account all ready for your arrival. It is a special migration service.

GinaUK

Just beware that they charge A LOT! Do a search for "Commonwealth Bank" on BE and see people's views.

Gina

Fardell

The Commonwealth bank doesn't get a lot of good press, and even their CEO recently admitted they had "customer problems" ... ie. less customers every day You can also establish an account with Westpac, which has a better reputation and a new low cost "One" account, and use anyone to convert GBP to AUD for you. I think/hope this is the link below;

http://www.westpac.com.au/internet/publish.nsf/content/pbit+migrant+banking" target=

Lindsay Clan

We've got an account with HSBC but use Eldridge Lynch in NZ to do our money transfers. They are really good with matching and giving better rates than anyone else and the time frame for the transfer is about three days. Would well recommend them. http://www.elynchfx.com/Entry/Contact.aspx


Lorraine