The Home Loan Estimator, a Tool Every Home Buyer Needs

So you’ve finally found the house you want to buy. It’s beautiful, and you can already picture yourself living in it, lounging in the living room and sauntering through to the spacious bedroom. You’re ready to be a homeowner, but there’s a gnawing feeling at the back of your mind that just won’t go away:

Do I qualify for a home loan to buy this house?

Not knowing how much you could qualify for can easily discourage you from applying for home financing but now it’s become easy to find out what you could afford, thanks to Absa’s latest feature called the Absa Home Loan Estimator now available on the Absa Homeowners App.

This new feature prepares you for the home-buying process by showing you how much you could qualify for, amongst other things.

We caught up with Nondumiso Ncapai, Head of Business Development at Absa Home Loans, to chat about how you can use the updated Homeowners App to help make your house hunting journey a smooth one.

Please tell us about this new Home Loan Estimator feature on the Homeowner’s App

The Home Loan Estimator is a new feature that has been added to our existing Homeowners App. It gives you a view of what you could qualify for and what your Absa Home Loan credit rating out of 10 is. The rating is an added feature to help customers understand the state of their credit profile with great tips on how to improve the rating. At the end of the process, a qualifying customer gets a certificate e-mailed, showing how much the customer could qualify for. The certificate is valid for 90 days. The app still assists customers to search for homes and calculate costs related to buying a home.

How long does the whole process take?

Typically, you can go through the Absa Home Loan Estimator process in under 15 minutes provided you have all the required information (Income and Expenses).

What inspired Absa to develop this new feature?

As a customer centric business, we place the customer at the heart of everything we do. The innovation is also informed by our understanding of the changing consumer landscape and the proliferation of the mobile device in Africa. As such the capability aligns to what customers are consistently looking for from a digital solution. The solution offers the customer convenience, choice, security and is simple to use.

Our Customer feedback and research also showed us that there’s a need for a tool that will help customers understand what they could qualify for early in the home-buying process.  We understand the anxiety that most customers go through when they consider making one of the biggest financial decision of their lives and that is buying a home. That’s why we developed the Home Loan Estimator feature, which is more powerful than any calculator.

Before you even start shopping for a home, it’s important to know what you can afford. You must also get a sense of where you stand from a credit profile perspective to make the best decision.

This new feature also gives the customer a credit rating. What’s taken into account when generating a credit rating?

We assess the customer profile at the bureau and additional elements from a home loans perspective. Whilst we provide the customer the score we also provide the customer tips on how to improve or manage the credit rating.

Is the app available to non-Absa customers?

Absolutely! It’s open to anyone. You can simply download the app for free from Google Play or App Store.