Sort Your Finance
Before You Set Foot in a Caravan Yard

1What Actually Happens When You Leave Finance to the Day

By the time you reach the finance desk at a dealership, you've inspected vans for hours, fallen for one, negotiated a price, and you can smell the open road. That is precisely the worst moment of the entire purchase to make a five-figure borrowing decision — and it's not an accident that it's the moment the decision gets put in front of you.

Three things work against you on the day:

• Decision fatigue is real. Regulator research into vehicle buying found that by the paperwork stage, buyers were mentally worn down and stopped scrutinising the line items — the price, the fees, the add-ons. You've made a hundred small decisions already; the finance contract is where the expensive ones hide.
• Everything gets negotiated at once. Van price, trade-in, loan rate, term, balloon, insurance add-ons — a dealer can give ground on the number you're watching and quietly take it back on one you aren't. Separate the decisions and every number has to stand on its own.
• The weekly-payment trick. Most buyers decide based on "can I afford the repayment?" rather than the total cost. Stretched over a 5–7 year loan, thousands of dollars of extras collapse into "only a few bucks a week" — which is exactly how they're sold. If you've ever wondered why yard price tags quote $/week, that's why.

None of this requires a dodgy dealer. It's just what happens when the person selling the van also arranges the money, in a room you're tired in, on a day you're excited. The fix isn't sharper haggling — it's not making the borrowing decision there at all.

2The Rules That Protect You at the Yard — and the Gaps

Dealer-arranged finance used to be far worse, and the history explains the leftover gaps.

Until November 2018, lenders let dealers set your interest rate themselves — and the higher the rate the dealer chose, the bigger the commission they kept. ASIC found buyers being charged several percentage points above the lender's base rate, at the dealer's discretion, regardless of their credit history. That practice ("flex commissions") is now banned, and the ban covers regulated consumer caravan loans, not just cars. But three gaps remain:

• Dealers still have rate discretion — they can price anywhere within a band below the lender's set rate, and their commission can still vary within it. The lender's set rate itself can be commission-loaded.
• Commissions don't have to be disclosed. Fixed commissions and origination fees on dealer-arranged loans are legal and there's no obligation to tell you what the dealer is paid for writing your loan.
• The person arranging your finance at the yard doesn't need a credit licence. Under a long-standing "point-of-sale" exemption, dealers who arrange finance are exempt from holding an Australian Credit Licence and from the responsible-lending obligations that licensed brokers and lenders carry. The Banking Royal Commission recommended abolishing this exemption back in 2019. It still hasn't happened.

And on the add-ons: an ASIC review of insurance sold through dealerships (gap cover, loan protection and the like) found buyers got back around 9 cents in claims for every dollar of premium. The products were so bad that since late 2021 the law forces a four-day pause before most add-on insurance can be sold to you after a vehicle purchase. Think about that: the day-of-purchase sales environment was officially judged too pressured for these decisions — by parliament. The loan itself carries no such pause.

One more thing worth knowing before you're standing at the contract table: in most Australian states there's no cooling-off period on a caravan purchase. Once you sign and pay a deposit, walking it back is somewhere between hard and impossible. Every decision you can lock in before that table — finance included — is pressure taken off the one moment you can't undo.

3What Pre-Approval Actually Is (and Isn't)

Pre-approval is a lender assessing your finances before you've picked a van and conditionally approving you to borrow up to a set amount. It's a ticket to shop, not a loan for one specific caravan.

What you get:

• A real ceiling — the amount a lender will actually put behind you, not a guess from a calculator.
• Shopping freedom — it's tied to an amount, not a particular van, so you can negotiate on any van under your ceiling.
• Speed when it matters — the slow part (verifying you) is already done, so settlement on the van you choose is typically fast.
• No obligation — if you don't buy, it simply lapses. Nothing to cancel, nothing owed.

And the honest fine print, because pre-approval gets oversold too:

• It's conditional, not guaranteed. Final approval happens when the lender sees the actual van and confirms nothing in your situation has changed. Anyone promising "guaranteed approval" is someone to walk away from.
• It expires — typically somewhere between 30 and 90 days depending on the lender. That's a feature, not a bug: it defines your shopping window.
• It doesn't lock an interest rate. It establishes your budget; the exact rate is set when the loan is finalised on the specific van.
• The van still has to qualify. Most lenders cap the van's age (roughly, age plus loan term under 20–25 years), and private sales involve extra verification. If you're hunting older or private-sale vans, say so up front so the pre-approval is shaped to what you're actually buying. More in the used caravan guide.

4Why It Changes the Negotiation

To a dealer, a buyer with finance already arranged is a cash buyer: the money is real, the sale can settle this week, and there's no finance-desk margin to be made on them. That changes how the conversation goes.

• One number on the table. With the borrowing settled, the only thing left to negotiate is the price of the van. No rate-vs-price-vs-trade-in shell game — there's nowhere for a concession on one number to be clawed back on another.
• A hard ceiling stops overbidding. "Fall in love, stretch the budget" is the oldest failure mode in caravan buying. A pre-approved amount is a line someone who isn't excited drew for you before you saw the van.
• Walk-away power is real power. Every experienced buyer says the same thing: the ability to genuinely walk away is worth more than any haggling technique. You can only walk away comfortably when your purchase doesn't depend on this dealer's finance desk.
• Sellers take you seriously — and not just dealers. In a private sale, a good van sells in days; a buyer who can settle this week beats a slightly higher offer who "just needs to sort the money".
• Negotiate the trade-in separately too. Same logic as the finance: get a standalone number for your old van (or sell it privately) before letting it into the deal. Every extra moving part in one negotiation is a place for value to leak.

5The Honest Bit: Sometimes Dealer Finance Wins

This isn't "dealer finance is always a rip-off." Manufacturer-subsidised promotional deals genuinely exist — low advertised rates, no balloon, deferred first payments — and sometimes they beat anything a broker can source. The point of pre-approval isn't to refuse dealer finance. It's to make dealer finance compete.

The play is simple: walk in with pre-approval, and if the dealer says they can beat it, let them try — in writing. Then compare properly:

• Comparison rate, not advertised rate — the advertised number excludes the fees; the comparison rate is the honest one. Full explanation here.
• Same term, same balloon — a longer term or a fat balloon makes any loan look cheaper per week while costing more in total.
• Total cost of credit — every dollar you'll hand over across the life of the loan. Ask both sides for this one figure and compare two numbers.
• Nothing bundled — no insurance, warranty products or accessories folded into the loan "while we're at it". Price every extra as a separate cash decision.

If the dealer's offer genuinely wins on those terms, take it — you've lost nothing, because pre-approval carries no obligation. Most of the time, the offer that looked shiny on a $/week price tag doesn't survive the comparison. Either way, you ran the auction.

6One Application, Not Five: Protect Your Credit File

A tempting wrong lesson from all this is "apply to a bunch of lenders and pick the best." Don't. In Australia every formal credit application can land a hard enquiry on your file, each one is visible to every future lender, and a cluster of them in a short window reads as financial distress and drags your score down — there's no "rate shopping" grace window here like you might read about on American sites.

The sane structure is one application, well aimed: a broker who checks your file softly first, compares their lender panel against your situation off to the side, and lodges a single application with the lender most likely to say yes at the best price. If your credit history is the thing making you nervous, read the bad-credit guide before you apply anywhere at all.

7How to Time It

Pre-approval usually comes back within a day or two of a complete application, and lasts weeks. So the sequencing is easy:

• Shortlisting vans? Run the repayment calculator to find your comfortable ceiling first, so you apply for a number you've stress-tested.
• Planning yard visits? Start the pre-approval a week or two beforehand. It'll be in hand before you smell the marine carpet.
• Heading to a caravan show? Apply 4–6 weeks out. Shows are the maximum-pressure environment — deposit-today pricing, crowds, limited stock — and exactly where a pre-sorted budget earns its keep.
• Window closes before you buy? Fine. It lapses quietly, and refreshing an existing application is far quicker than starting cold.

Everything on this page is general information, not advice about any particular loan — your situation is priced by a lender, not a webpage. And before the yard visit itself, run through the buying checklist so finance isn't the only thing you've sorted in advance.