NSW home loan statistics: the investor share of new lending is rising

Investors accounted for 39.7% of new NSW home loan commitments by number in 2023-24. That share has risen every year since: 42.0% in 2024-25, and 44.1% in 2025-26. This page compiles that finding from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' own published lending data, covering new loan commitments only (not refinancing, and not a count of completed property settlements).

General statistical information about new home lending in NSW, compiled from ABS data. It is not financial or legal advice, and a loan commitment is not the same as a completed purchase or property settlement. For advice about your own transaction, speak with your licensed conveyancer, solicitor or mortgage broker. About our editorial standards.

The headline finding

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' Lending Indicators release publishes new home loan commitment figures by state and by borrower type each quarter. Summed to financial years (July to June), NSW investors' share of new household loan commitments, by number, has climbed in each of the last three complete financial years: 39.7% in 2023-24, 42.0% in 2024-25, and 44.1% in 2025-26. By value, the pattern is the same: 41.2%, 43.2%, then 44.2%. This only covers the three most recent complete financial years available; it is not a claim about any longer-run high or record.

"Investor share" here means investor commitments as a proportion of all NSW household new loan commitments (owner-occupier plus investor) in that financial year, excluding refinancing. These are ORIGINAL (not seasonally adjusted) ABS series summed across four quarters; summing a full financial year removes most of the seasonal pattern each individual quarter carries (see Methodology and scope).

Owner-occupier and investor lending, by financial year

In 2025-26, NSW recorded 87,016 new owner-occupier loan commitments worth $74.14bn, and 68,662 new investor loan commitments worth $58.76bn. Investor lending grew faster than owner-occupier lending over the year: investor commitments were up 15.0% and investor value up 17.2%, compared with 5.7% and 12.6% for owner-occupiers.

Both series cover "total dwellings excluding refinancing" (construction, purchase of newly erected or existing dwellings), for NSW households only. They exclude refinancing of existing loans and exclude business borrowing, and they count loan commitments, not completed settlements: not every commitment proceeds to a finalised purchase.

Average loan size

Dividing each financial year's total value by its number of commitments gives an average loan size. For owner-occupiers, the average new NSW loan rose from $799,956 in 2024-25 to $851,980 in 2025-26, up 6.5%. The average investor loan rose more slowly, from $839,506 to $855,782, up 1.9%.

Methodology and scope

Every figure on this page comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Lending Indicators release (June Quarter 2026 edition), specifically the New South Wales owner-occupier and investor time-series workbooks, fetched directly from abs.gov.au for this page and read cell by cell, not summarised from a rendered chart or a third party's write-up. Financial-year totals, shares and averages shown are calculated from those published quarterly figures.

These are ORIGINAL series, not seasonally adjusted or trend estimates. The ABS's own convention is to read seasonally adjusted or trend series for quarter-to-quarter movement, since original quarterly figures carry a normal seasonal pattern. Summing four quarters to a financial year removes most of that seasonality, which is why this page reports financial-year totals as its primary figures rather than any single quarter. This page compares only the three most recent complete financial years (2023-24 to 2025-26); it does not claim any figure is a high, low or record relative to years before that, and the NSW investor loan-count series used here starts in the September quarter 2019.

"New loan commitments" are new lending approvals to NSW households, for the construction or purchase of a dwelling. They exclude refinancing of existing loans and exclude lending to businesses. A loan commitment is not the same thing as a completed property settlement: some commitments do not proceed to a finalised purchase, and this data is not a count of NSW property sales, transfers or settlements. For those figures, see our NSW transfer duty statistics page, which compiles a separate Revenue NSW dataset.

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