Why Smart Developers Are Ditching Traditional Brokers
With capital markets more complex than ever, a new generation of developers is turning to specialist debt advisors for tailored funding strategies, long-term partnerships, and access to alternative capital others can’t reach.
2 min
Debt advisors go beyond brokering deals—they design capital strategies. Acting as portfolio stewards and trusted intermediaries, they align developer objectives with lender requirements to deliver tailored, long-term funding solutions.
Broader Access to Capital Markets
With relationships across a vast network of banks, non-bank financiers, private credit funds, and family offices, debt advisors provide access to alternative capital sources.
This reach enables the construction of customised capital stacks that may include mezzanine facilities, preferred equity, hybrid instruments, and other structured solutions that align with a project’s risk profile and lifecycle.
Especially in a constrained credit environment, this breadth of access often delivers superior pricing, greater leverage, and more flexibility compared to traditional broker-led channels.
Terms That Matter
While headline interest rates draw attention, debt advisors focus on the full picture. They negotiate on critical elements such as covenant headroom, redraw mechanics, amortisation profiles, prepayment terms, and security structures—preserving flexibility and mitigating future risk to improve project outcomes and capital efficiency.
Strategic Portfolio Management
In volatile markets, static debt can become a liability. Debt advisors continuously reassess and recalibrate facilities in response to rate changes, shifting market conditions, and project developments.
They coordinate refinancing, lead repricing discussions, and identify early exit opportunities to safeguard returns, ensuring that developers maintain balance sheet agility and reduce refinancing risk.
Master Interpreters Between Developers & Lenders
One of the most valuable functions a debt advisor performs is acting as an interpreter between developers and lenders. They understand both perspectives. By positioning proposals to align with lender frameworks, including committee metrics, serviceability models, and concentration thresholds, debt advisors use their reputational equity to influence lender decisions in ways that principals often cannot..
Proactive Risk Management
Debt advisors monitor macroeconomic trends, interest rate movements, and evolving credit standards to proactively flag risks within a developer’s portfolio. They identify refinancing inflection points, highlight covenant sensitivities, and build risk-mitigation strategies into the capital stack from day one, leveraging expertise in derivatives, hedging, and alternative security structures.
Regulatory & Market Intelligence
Navigating Australia’s dynamic regulatory landscape, including issues around non-bank lending, capital adequacy, and AML/CTF, debt advisors provide developers with real-time market insights. This intelligence helps avoid pitfalls and seize opportunities in an ever-shifting capital environment.
Efficiency Through Specialisation
Outsourcing the capital function to a specialist debt advisor streamlines operations and reduces internal bandwidth requirements. From managing data rooms and leading negotiations to coordinating legal documentation, debt advisors take on the operational burden, allowing developers to focus on delivery, construction, sales, and execution.
A Long‑Term Partnership Model
With a deep understanding of a developer’s portfolio, including facility history and long-term objectives, debt advisors are well-positioned to secure faster approvals, better terms, and smoother execution. Their established relationships with capital providers, coupled with portfolio insight, lead to more efficient and favourable outcomes across future projects. Over time, this strategic partnership becomes a competitive edge.
In Summary
In today’s selective capital markets, simple transactional brokering is no longer enough. Developers require strategic insight, risk foresight, and a partner who speaks both the lender’s and borrower’s language. Having a trusted advisor is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity.
Faris Dedic is the Founder and Managing Director of DIG Capital Advisory and COI Capital Management
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The Federal Budget may have softened some of its proposed tax reforms, but it has exposed a bigger issue: too many families are relying on wealth structures that no longer reflect the realities of modern life.
3 min
For many Australians, the 2026 Federal Budget initially felt like a direct challenge to the way wealth is created, held and transferred between generations.
The headlines were immediate: changes to capital gains tax, reforms to discretionary trusts, restrictions on negative gearing and increased scrutiny of investment structures. Unsurprisingly, affluent families, business owners and investors began asking the same question:
Is the way we hold our wealth still fit for purpose?
In recent days, the government has announced several significant amendments following industry consultation and public feedback, including exempting testamentary trusts from the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax and expanding capital gains tax concessions for small businesses.
The backdown is welcome. But it also highlights something much bigger.
This Budget has accelerated a conversation that many Australian families have been postponing for years.
The conversation is not really about tax. It is about wealth stewardship.
For decades, Australians have built wealth through businesses, property, investments and careful long-term planning. Yet many families have not revisited the legal structures surrounding those assets in years, sometimes decades.
We often see clients who have spent years building significant wealth, only to discover their legal arrangements no longer reflect their current circumstances.
Their children are now adults. They may own multiple properties.
They may have sold a business, entered a second marriage, become grandparents or accumulated digital assets that did not exist when their original estate plans were prepared.
The trust that distributes income may need to be reconsidered. The bucket company may no longer be so attractive.
The Budget has simply exposed a reality that already existed: wealth structures cannot remain static while life continues to evolve.
Importantly, trusts themselves are not the issue.
Trusts are legitimate planning tools that provide flexibility, protection and continuity. When used appropriately, they allow families to adapt to changing circumstances over time.
And neither is tax the issue, really. Getting the fundamentals right is more important for long-term, sustainable wealth than a few favourable tax treatments around the edges.
The real issue is complacency.
Too often, families create structures and assume the job is done. It isn’t.
Estate planning is no longer a document you sign once and file away in a drawer. It is an ongoing process that should evolve alongside your life.
We are also seeing a broader shift in how Australians define wealth itself. It is no longer just the family home and an investment portfolio.
Modern wealth includes businesses, digital assets, cryptocurrency, intellectual property, frequent flyer points and increasingly complex family arrangements.
At the same time, Australians are living longer than ever before, meaning wealth may need to support multiple generations simultaneously. This creates new responsibilities and new risks.
How do you help your children enter the property market without exposing family wealth to relationship breakdowns?
How do you structure wealth so that it remains a source of opportunity rather than future conflict?
These are the questions families should be asking now.
The recent debate surrounding testamentary trusts also serves as an important reminder that policy decisions can have unintended consequences for vulnerable Australians. It is encouraging that the government has listened to feedback and clarified its position.
But the lesson remains: the wealth landscape is changing.
Increasingly, governments, regulators and tax authorities are paying closer attention to how wealth is held and transferred. That means families cannot afford to adopt a “set-and-forget” approach to their structures.
The families who will be best placed for the future are not necessarily those with the greatest wealth.
They are the families with the greatest clarity. Clarity around ownership, succession and governance. And clarity around how wealth will transition from one generation to the next.
Ultimately, preserving wealth is not about avoiding change.
It is about preparing for it.
Because the greatest risk is not change itself.
It is losing the ability to respond to it.
Anthony Hunt is Co-Founder of Wealth Lawyers and former COO of Westpac Private Bank. He advises business owners, investors and affluent Australian families on wealth protection, succession planning and intergenerational wealth transfer
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