Finder’s Home Loan Awards methodology

What are the Finder Home Loan Awards?

Finder's Home Loan Awards are part of the annual Finder Awards program. We evaluate home loans from across the market by looking at interest rates, loan fees and features to find our award winners.

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Selection criteria

The products were included in the categories if they were currently available and met the following criteria:

• All categories: An interest rate of 7.5% or under.
• Owner Occupier Home Loan - Variable: Variable interest rate, 80% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type.
• Owner Occupier Home Loan - 1-3 Year Fixed: Fixed interest rate, 1- to 3-year fixed rate length, 80% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type.
• Investor Home Loan - P&I - Variable: Variable interest rate, investor home loan, 80% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type.
• Investor Home Loan - Interest only - Variable: Variable interest rate, investor home loan, 80% max LVR or higher, interest-only repayment type.
• Investor Home Loan - Interest only - 1-3 Year Fixed: Fixed interest rate, 1- to 3-year fixed rate length, investor home loan, 80% max LVR or higher, interest-only repayment type.
• First Home Buyer Home Loan: Variable interest rate, first home buyer loan, 90% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type.
• Owner Occupier Home Loan - Refinance Variable: Variable interest rate, 70% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type, less than $200,000 min loan amount, more than $500,000 max loan amount.
• Owner Occupier Home Loan - Refinance Fixed: Fixed interest rate, 70% max LVR or higher, principal-and-interest repayment type, less than $200,000 min loan amount, more than $500,000 max loan amount.
• Home Loan Provider of the Year: 80% LVR or higher, investor and owner-occupier, any repayment type, same weighting as owner-occupier variable.
• Big Four Home Loan Provider of the Year: 80% LVR or higher (also investor and OO), any repayment, same weighting as owner-occupier variable.

Scoring

Metrics scored using either the tired scores when dealing with categorical data points or a dynamic scoring when dealing with numeric data. Finder's dynamic scoring means a product's metric is scored in comparison to the data points of all the other competitor products.

Metrics	Scoring
Offset facility	10 if offset account available, 0 if not
Interest rate	Inverse percentile rank
Total fees	Inverse percentile rank

Weights

Final award score

The final award score is calculated by first calculating a score for each of the previous 12 months. This evaluates each product against the competing products in those particular months. This score is calculated by multiplying the score for each metric by the weight percentage and summing the weighted scores:

The final award score is calculated by taking a weighted average of the monthly scores with more recent months being weighted progressively heavier. This final award score is then ranked to determine the overall winners for each category.

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