iscover 
The figures, shared with Broker Daily, come as chief customer officer Steve Odgers said brokers were playing a key role in helping borrowers navigate the federal government’s shared equity scheme.
Launched in December 2025, the Help to Buy scheme enables eligible buyers to purchase a home with a minimum 2 per cent deposit, with the federal government contributing up to 40 per cent of the purchase price for a new home or up to 30 per cent for an existing home in exchange for an equity stake.
By the end of the 2025 financial year, Help to Buy had received more than 7,200 applications. Of these, 4,800 applicants have either settled or found a home, while the remainder are actively looking.
Bank Australia and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) were the inaugural participating lenders when the scheme initially launched, but Teachers Mutual Bank Limited this week (27 July) became the latest lender to join the program.
As well as CBA, however, Teachers Mutual will initially only offer Help to Buy through its proprietary channel before extending access to accredited brokers from October.
CBA has said previously that it may start writing Help to Buy loans through the broker channel in the future.
Navigating the scheme
Odgers said brokers had become an important part of Bank Australia’s Help to Buy application process, helping borrowers understand both the eligibility requirements and the shared equity model before submitting an application.
He said that while the bank had seen little difference in the content and success rates between broker-originated and direct applications, brokers were crucial in helping customers determine whether the scheme was right for them before formally applying.
“Brokers certainly will have the conversation early on because they’ve got a duty of care to make sure the customer understands the loan that’s available,” he said.
“One of the things is whether they actually meet all the criteria, and then the second thing is providing all the documentation they need to be able to participate in the scheme.
“The documentation of the loan is a little bit more complex because with the Help to Buy scheme, the government owns some equity in your house, so there’s lots of documents that need to be signed.”
The scheme has primarily attracted first home buyers, who account for 86 per cent of participants, while almost 70 per cent of applicants are single, including 12 per cent who are single parents. Older single women also represent a growing cohort, with 42 per cent of female participants aged 40 or over.
Odgers said that those coming through the broker channel with Bank Australia tended to be younger and a first home buyer.
Given the complexity of the scheme, the demographics of the users and the fact that brokers only have Bank Australia on panel to offer the Help to Buy product, Odgers added that the role as credit adviser was accentuated.
“I think it’s about guiding them through the service. It’s about having something different to offer in terms of the scheme loans, having something different to offer in terms of the bank that we are relative to other banks, and of course we have to meet the market on price,” he said.
Why more lenders haven’t joined
While Teachers Mutual became the latest lender to join the Help to Buy scheme this week, Odgers said participating required significant investment in systems and processes, with lenders needing to manage shared equity loans differently from standard mortgages.
He added that Bank Australia was able to leverage capabilities it had already built through its participation in Victoria’s shared equity scheme, giving it a head start when the national program launched.
“We participated in the Victorian scheme early on and, off the back of that, built a lot of capability that we need to be able to assess and process these loans because they do need to be processed differently,” he said.
Odgers said Help to Buy loans also tended to remain undrawn for longer, requiring lenders to monitor exposures over an extended period.
“They tend to have a much longer gap between when the customer applies for the financing and then they actually find the house that they want to invest in. So the loans tend to be sitting, waiting for drawdown, for a longer period of time,” he said.
Lenders therefore needed systems capable of managing those additional requirements.
“Some banks who may be considering participating in the scheme will have to start to build that capability from scratch,” he said.
“It’s not simple. There’s a fair amount of work that needs to be done in the background.”
Future expansion?
Currently, 10,000 places on the Help to Buy scheme are made available each financial year, totalling 40,000 places overall.
Victoria has seen the strongest demand, followed by NSW and Queensland. The scheme achieved a full national rollout last month after expanding into Tasmania.
New places were released on 1 July 2026 with new income limits, but compared to the 5 per cent Deposit scheme, which has already helped 300,000 Australians into home ownership, the scope and scale of Help to Buy have been more limited.
“We’re working closely with Housing Australia, and if they decide that the scheme needs to increase because of demand, then we’ll work with them to try to assist them for that to happen,” Odgers said.
[Related: The latest lender changes at a glance]
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?Make Broker Daily a preferred news source on Google.