Tom Hawley

Tom Hawley Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Tom Hawley, Mortgage brokers, Level 2/36 Cross Street, Double Bay, Sydney.

Co-Founder of Azura Financial
🏆 Residential Broker of the Year 2024/25/26
🏆 Brokerage of the Year 2024/25
1,250+ Google Reviews | Award-Winning Sydney Mortgage Brokerage
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Sat down with Julian Fayad on Lost and Founders pod.We got into the Azura Financial story, six years with no business pl...
03/09/2026

Sat down with Julian Fayad on Lost and Founders pod.

We got into the Azura Financial story, six years with no business plan, four of us crammed into an office so small we couldn’t have two phone calls going at once. I swear it feels like ten years ago was two weeks ago. Last financial year we settled $2.4 billion in loans. Insane when I actually say it out loud.

But most of the conversation was about what’s actually going on in this country.

Single operator brokers are in for a tough run. The industry’s more complicated than it’s ever been, and the gap between businesses that have invested in technology and the ones still doing everything on paper is only getting wider.

Anyone who watches my content knows I don’t tend to hold back. We got into the RBA’s decisions, cutting rates to zero and flooding the system with cheap money, and now everyone’s shocked that property is completely out of reach. The government’s answer is to tax the result instead of fixing the actual cause. It’s backwards. Genuinely backwards.

Immigration and housing supply came up too. It’s not complicated, it’s just supply and demand. Same with the public sector jobs boom nobody wants to talk about properly.

People love the line, of course he’d say that, he’s a mortgage broker. Mate, I’ve heard it a hundred times. It’s got nothing to do with my business. It’s about the younger generation getting handed a bill they didn’t run up.

Full episode’s out now on Lost and Founders. Link in bio.

31/08/2026

On a $3M property in Sydney, the price has dropped $156k in the last three months.

On a $1M property, it’s dropped $14k.

That’s the entire case for upsizing right now. National prices fell 0.7% in July, the biggest monthly drop since December 2022, but the top end is getting smoked while the bottom end stays supported.

Sydney’s top quartile is down 5.2% over three months. The cheapest quartile, only 1.4%.

Downturns don’t last forever. The window to move up while the gap is this wide won’t either.

31/08/2026

The RBA is banning card surcharges from 1 October, set to save Australians $600 million a year.

The banks have already found a way to take it back.

St George is lifting credit card rates from 20.99% to 23.99% and hiking annual fees. Westpac’s doing similar. NAB is up 1.5%. CBA has gutted its rewards points program.

This is the pattern with every regulatory win. The cost doesn’t disappear, it just moves somewhere else in the system.

If you’re leaning on points as your reason for using a card, run the actual numbers, interest plus fees against what the rewards are really worth. Most people are surprised by the answer.

28/08/2026

9 years ago, our office was a dining table.
 
I’d put a suit on, walk into the living room, open the laptop and get to work 😂
 
Then we moved into this little office in Double Bay and genuinely thought we were flying.
 
Fast forward to today - we’ve filled 55 desks in our current office and we’re already looking for more space.
 
Business definitely hasn’t been a straight line. There have been years of big growth and plenty where it’s just been about chipping away and getting a little bit better.
 
But that’s probably the biggest lesson.
 
Don’t underestimate what consistent progress can look like over 10 years.
 
Keep chipping away. 📈
 
Excited to see where the next 10 take us.

27/08/2026

A developer with 22,000 apartments and 3,500 homes under construction has gone into administration. $3.5 billion owed.

You’ve seen the headline. Buyers could lose deposits, tradies could go unpaid, and that’s genuinely bad. But it’s also the easy part to understand.

What’s easy to miss is that this doesn’t stay contained to one company.

Property development runs on a chain: investor, to fund, to developer, to tradie, to finished home. Every link depends on the one before it. When a collapse this size hits, it doesn’t just damage the people directly involved, it shakes confidence right through that entire chain. Investors get nervous about where else their money’s exposed. Funds get more cautious about who they lend to next. Developers who had nothing to do with this one start finding it harder to get funded.

That knock-on effect is the part that actually matters, and it’s easy to miss if you only read the headline.

27/08/2026

Unemployment ticked up to 4.5% in July, and the RBA will most likely be quietly pleased about it.

Here’s the part people miss. Central banks don’t just fight inflation with rate hikes, they need the labour market to loosen to actually get there. A tighter job market means more bargaining power for wages, which keeps inflation sticky. So a softer labour market is the mechanism, not a side effect.

Victoria and Tasmania are running the highest unemployment at 5.1%, South Australia the lowest at 4.1%. The RBA’s own forecasts have unemployment climbing further, to 4.8% by 2028.

Cash rate’s still sitting at 4.35% after three hikes this year, both June and August were unanimous holds. All four major banks think the hiking cycle has peaked, and there’s a growing view that the property market’s weakness might make it hard to justify another hike even if inflation stays sticky.

The honest version of this story: fewer jobs and slower wage growth is the price being paid to bring prices back under control.

Update since filming: NAB is now also forecasting a September rate hike.

26/08/2026

Inflation came in at 3.5% today, down from 3.8%, but still hotter than the 3.3% economists were expecting.

Housing was the single biggest driver, up 5% over the year, rents and mortgage costs just aren’t cooling the way everything else is.

Up until today, all four major banks had called the hiking cycle over. The RBA held rates in August, but flagged the risk that inflation could run hotter than forecast. That risk just showed up.

Markets have already lifted the odds of a September hike off the back of this, and a growing number of economists are now saying it’s on the table for the RBA’s 29 September meeting.

The one thing potentially buying borrowers time? The property market’s own weakness might be enough to make the RBA think twice before pulling the trigger again.

We’re not out of the woods yet.

24/08/2026

Metricon, one of Australia’s largest home builders, just reported sales down 40% in some markets.

Fewer buyers in the market because prices are falling means developers can’t shift existing stock, and if you can’t sell what you’ve already built, you’re not taking on new sites or new projects.

That’s the uncomfortable link between falling property prices and housing supply that doesn’t get talked about enough.

We all want housing to be more affordable, but if this downturn drags on, it could end up slowing the very supply we need to fix the crisis long term.

24/08/2026

Why are expensive homes falling faster than affordable ones? A few reasons. They benefited more from cheap money during COVID, so they’ve got further to fall.

They’re more exposed to higher interest rates. And buyers at that end tend to be more switched on to where the economy’s heading, so when confidence dips, they pull back harder.

Meanwhile the affordable end is still being propped up by first home buyer schemes. It’s a genuinely uneven market right now.

24/08/2026

Cotality AU July housing data shows the top 25% of properties in Sydney and Melbourne have fallen around 5% in just three months, while the more affordable end has only dropped about 1.5%.

On a $3 million property that’s roughly $150,000 off. On a $1 million property, only $15,000. If you’ve been wanting to upsize, the gap between what you’re selling and what you’re buying just got smaller.

Address

Level 2/36 Cross Street, Double Bay
Sydney, NSW
2028

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+61412876673

Website

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