For eligibility, you will need to ensure you:
- Are an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident of Australia
- Are aged 18 or over
- Have a regular, verifiable Australian taxable income
- Have a fixed, verifiable residential address in Australia
Other credit and approval criteria will apply depending on individual circumstances.
You can apply online through our online form. Make sure you meet our basic eligibility criteria for our home finance before applying.
The application process
1. Apply online
The online application may take around 10 minutes to complete where you’ll tell us about:
- The type of property and finance you’re after
- Your deposit or equity
- Your finances, including income, assets. liabilities and expenses
2. Assessment
Based on what you’ve told us, we will assess your application. During this stage our finance manager may get in contact with you regarding your eligibility, request additional documents, provide you with an idea of how much finance amount you might be eligible for and progress things to the next stage.
3. Conditional Approval
After assessing your application, if you’re successful we may be able to provide you with a conditional approval where you will be requested to become a member of ICFAL and hold a minimum of 10% of the estimated property price until funds become available.
4. Full Approval
Once we’ve valued your property and completed other verification, we’ll let you know when your application’s been fully approved. Accept our finance offer and you’re on your way to settlement – congratulations!
We offer Home Finance to a maximum amount of $700,000 over a maximum period of 30 years.
The time period allowed is reduced by 1 year for each year the member is above 40 years of age.
The payments made to ICFAL are based on the concept of trading and reflects the real-world return on property investment.
The monthly payments made to ICFAL consists of 3 components:
1. Rent – The rental fees paid to ICFAL are taken from a market valuation at the beginning of the contract. A pre-determined rental increase is negotiated and applied at the beginning of the contract.
2. Share purchase – This is the original contribution ICFAL made to purchase the property. ICFAL then offers these shares for sale to the member on a monthly basis.
3. Profit on share purchase – This is the profit ICFAL makes from selling its shares back to the member on a monthly basis.
Over time, the rent and profit on share purchases paid to ICFAL can change depending on market forces on the real estate market. These rates are reviewed every 3, 5 or 10 years depending on a member’s request.
1. We are not tied to prevailing interest rates.
ICFAL’s Musharaka model wasn’t always more expensive. We are currently witnessing historic lows in the prevailing market interest rates. In fact, prior to the historically low-interest rate environment, we are experiencing now, ICFAL was competitive and even cheaper than the prevailing interest rates.
Due to the fact that ICFAL’s profit rates are not directly related to the prevailing interest rates, our profit rates will always be different to the market.
Our funding is purely from our members and therefore we are not under any obligations to third parties to fix ourselves to the prevailing interest rates.
2. ICFAL is still a relatively small provider of finance compared to many conventional banks. Therefore, we naturally have a higher cost base to run our operations in order to benefit the community. The larger organisations have a much greater volume of transactions and therefore can pass on cost savings to the members.
1. Our funds are strictly sourced only from our members and kept in an interest-free bank account.
2. Our unique Musharakah model allows us to share in any equity profits and losses in the sale of the property in the market.
3. The rent and profits paid under our Musharaka financing model are calculated based on the actual rent and property prices using an independent valuer. It is not tied to the prevailing market interest rates in any way.
A 20% deposit is required when applying for Home Finance.
