Commercial Property Loans Sydney: Former Bankers for Refinancing, Equity Release and Buying Sheds, Suites and Shopfronts in a State That Charges No Duty on a Refinance

Commercial Property Loans Sydney: Former Bankers for Refinancing, Equity Release and Buying Sheds, Suites and Shopfronts in a State That Charges No Duty on a Refinance

Sydney commercial borrowers are searching for one thing ahead of everything else in 2026: how to refinance a commercial property loan. The case for looking is stronger here than in any other capital, for three reasons. New South Wales abolished mortgage duty on 1 July 2016, so the state takes nothing when a loan moves; the only government charges are two NSW Land Registry Services dealings at $182.73 each including GST on the 2026/27 schedule. Sydney industrial values have held, with Cushman & Wakefield’s Sydney Logistics and Industrial MarketBeat for Q2 2026 recording prime yields steady at 5.20 per cent and vacancy at 3.7 per cent, so a warehouse financed in 2019 or 2021 usually sits at a lower LVR than the one its margin was set on. And the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.60 per cent on 29 September 2026, the fourth rise of the year, so no facility is getting cheaper by itself. Refinancing and equity release come first on this page, then buying, all through the lens of Sydney, written by former major-bank lenders who price Sydney files across more than 40 lenders, from Melbourne, by video.

Why the Sydney commercial conversation starts with refinancing

Most commercial facilities in Sydney were priced once, on the day they settled, against the file the lender saw that day, and a periodic review is not a repricing. Three things move in the borrower’s favour between settlement and today, and in Sydney all three have moved. For a South Australian purchase the duty question does not arise at all, which moves the cost to land tax: our Adelaide commercial guide runs the aggregation rules.

The loan to value ratio has drifted down. Repayments have reduced the balance while Sydney industrial values have held: Cushman & Wakefield’s Q2 2026 MarketBeat has prime yields unchanged at 5.20 per cent and secondary yields at 5.81 per cent, with almost $1.1 billion of Sydney industrial property traded in the first half of the year. Our commercial rates guide quantifies the lever: each 10 per cent step down in LVR is typically worth somewhere between 0.25 and 0.75 per cent a year, and only a fresh valuation can turn the step into a saving. Office is the exception. A North Sydney or Macquarie Park suite can have moved the other way, and the valuation is where a soft market shows up first, so on an office refinance we look at the value before the rate.

The lease has been renewed, or the business has grown up. A leased investment written on a short lease reprices differently once a national tenant signs for five years, and a facility written on lease doc or low doc terms when the business was two years old is outgrown once there are two clean years of full financials.

The paperwork has eased for smaller balances. Balances under $1.5 million have an easier path: one major bank’s current streamlined refinance takes twelve months of clean repayments and a self-declared statement of position in place of full financials, subject to change and to the bank’s criteria.

The right order is the one our same bank versus switching guide sets out. Ask your current lender to reprice first, because it costs nothing and a simple reprice usually adds no enquiry to your credit file, and arrive with a competing assessment from the wider panel so the retention desk has a number to answer. Switch when the gap stays wide, when the bank will not move, or when the structure no longer fits. The commercial refinance guide walks the process step by step.

In short: a Sydney commercial refinance carries no state duty. Section 203A of the Duties Act 1997 (NSW) provides that mortgage duty is abolished on and from 1 July 2016, and transfer duty is a purchase cost rather than a refinance cost, because the property does not change hands. The government’s whole contribution is two dealings at NSW Land Registry Services, the discharge of the old mortgage and the registration of the new one, each listed on the 2026/27 fee schedule at $166.60 excluding GST and $182.73 including it, charged per dealing. Everything else on the cost side is a lender’s choice, and our refinancing costs guide names each line and who charges it: a discharge fee from the lender you are leaving, a break cost if the rate is fixed, and an establishment, valuation, legal and documentation fee from the lender you are joining. On a fixed rate, get the payout figure first; it often settles the question in a line.

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Sydney commercial refinance calculator: what switching saves after NSW costs

Type the balance and rate from your statement, the rate quoted in writing, and the years left on the loan, then itemise the switching costs: the two NSW Land Registry Services dealings are prefilled from the 2026/27 schedule, everything else comes from your lenders, and a blank field is treated as zero. The tool returns the monthly and annual saving, the total switching cost, the months to break even, the interest saved over the remaining term, and a plain-words verdict.

Assumptions, all labelled: repayments are principal and interest, monthly, over the remaining term you enter, on both loans, so no term reset is modelled; our national commercial refinance calculator covers a refinance that also lengthens the term. Interest only periods, line and review fees, and any change in security sit outside the arithmetic. The NSW Land Registry Services fees are the 2026/27 amounts for a discharge of mortgage and a mortgage, including GST; every other cost is what you type. Break-even is the switching cost divided by the monthly saving, rounded up to whole months, before tax. Arithmetic, not credit advice, and not a quote. To have the quoted rate and your switching costs checked against the wider panel, book a free commercial refinance review.

Equity release against a Sydney commercial property

The second most common Sydney commercial conversation is the owner who wants to use the building rather than sell it. An owner can borrow against the difference between today’s value and today’s debt in one of two ways: rewrite the whole loan at a larger amount, or leave it alone and add a second facility next to it. Whether the current rate is fixed, and what it would cost to break, usually decides between them, as our commercial equity release guide explains.

There are two gates, in order. The valuation sets the ceiling: the lender orders a current valuation and holds total lending to its cap for the asset, and the thing that has done most for Sydney owners here is the land under the shed. Cushman & Wakefield’s Q2 2026 report has industrial land in one to five hectare lots averaging $1,522 a square metre as a blended figure across Western Sydney and closer to $3,225 a square metre in South Sydney, held steady through the quarter. The income sets the limit: released equity is new borrowing, assessed on the business’s financials, the property’s rent, or both, so two owners with the same paper equity can walk away with very different amounts.

Sydney owners use it for the purposes the guide lists: working capital, equipment, a fit-out, the next property, and moving expensive unsecured business debt onto property-secured pricing, which our business loan refinance savings calculator quantifies. The honest caution is that the premises secure every dollar released, so equity release for a defined purpose works, and equity release to cover recurring losses moves the problem onto the roof over the business.

Sydney’s commercial market in 2026, sector by sector

A credit desk does not read Sydney as one market. It reads four, and it prices each on how easily the bank could sell the building if it had to.

Office: a recovering CBD and two metropolitan markets under pressure. On 6 August the Property Council of Australia published its Office Market Report covering the six months to July 2026. It has Sydney CBD vacancy at 13.3 per cent, above the historical average of 9.1 per cent but with demand positive for a fourth consecutive period, no new supply over the half, and premium vacancy down from 8.9 to 7.7 per cent. North Sydney eased slightly to 25.8 per cent and Macquarie Park rose to a record 25.1 per cent. The release carries no Parramatta figure, so we say only what everyone in that market knows: Parramatta is Sydney’s second office market, anchored by government tenants, Barangaroo is where the premium demand the report describes lives, and Tech Central around Central station is the precinct the state is building for technology tenants. For a lender, a premium tower floor on a long lease is lent against on ordinary terms; an older B-grade floor in North Sydney on a short lease gets a reduced LVR, a shorter term and often a request for a second security.

Industrial: the asset every lender wants, across seven submarkets. Cushman & Wakefield’s Sydney Logistics and Industrial MarketBeat for Q2 2026 puts total vacancy at 3.7 per cent, down from 3.8 per cent in the first quarter despite speculative completions. By submarket the report has the Outer West at 4.9 per cent, the South West at 4.3, the West at 4.0, the Central West at 3.8, the South at 3.7, the North West at 2.1 and the North at 0.5 per cent. That is the belt from Eastern Creek and Erskine Park through Marsden Park, Kemps Creek and the Western Sydney Airport corridor, Prestons and Moorebank in the south west, and Port Botany and Banksmeadow in the south, where the report’s South submarket carries the highest prime rents in Sydney. A plain warehouse in any of these precincts is the security a Sydney credit desk can resell quickest, which is why an owner-occupier with tidy financials can reach the highest LVR here.

Retail: strips, priced on the lease. Oxford Street, King Street in Newtown, Norton Street in Leichhardt and Military Road on the lower north shore are the shopfront files we see. No named report gave us a strip vacancy or rent figure today, so we describe them as they lend: a shop with a hospitality or medical tenant on a five year lease sits in the standard 65 to 75 per cent band, and a vacant shell on a strip with turnover in its tenancies gets a lower ceiling and a harder read of the lease.

Medical: four precincts, one specialised rung. Westmead, Randwick, St Leonards and Liverpool anchor Sydney’s consulting suite markets around their hospitals. Consulting rooms are a specialised asset in the lender ladder our deposit and LVR guide describes, so the LVR ceiling is decided file by file rather than from a table; where an established practice occupies the rooms, or a super fund owns them and rents them to the practice, most of our panel will consider the loan. The products behind all four sectors are in our commercial property loans guide.

NSW transfer duty on commercial property at Sydney price points

Refinancing carries no duty; buying does. NSW transfer duty on commercial property is charged at the general rates for the 2026/27 year set by Revenue NSW: $11,602 plus $4.50 per $100 over $387,000 up to $1,290,000, then $52,237 plus $5.50 per $100 above that, on the higher of the price and the market value. Revenue NSW confines the premium rate, $194,137 plus $7.00 per $100 over $3,870,000, to residential property, and surcharge purchaser duty of 9 per cent to residential-related property acquired by foreign persons, so a $4 million warehouse attracts $201,287 of duty for any buyer, where Revenue NSW’s own example puts a $4 million house at $203,237 before any surcharge.

Duty computed from the Revenue NSW 2026/27 transfer duty schedule, with no concession, no premium rate and no surcharge purchaser duty, none of which apply to non-residential property. The 25 per cent deposit is a midpoint of the indicative bands on our national commercial pages, from 20 per cent for an owner-occupied standard industrial unit to 30 to 40 per cent for a leased investment; the ceiling is applied to the lender’s valuation rather than the contract price.

Lenders do not fund duty: on the $1.8 million warehouse in the table the buyer brings $450,000 of deposit and $80,287 of duty in cash, plus GST at settlement if the sale is taxable, which is the next section.

Land tax and GST after settlement

Land tax. A home is exempt from NSW land tax and a warehouse is not. Revenue NSW’s thresholds and rates page fixes the general threshold at $1,075,000 of land value and the premium threshold at $6,571,000, frozen rather than indexed, with tax of $100 plus 1.6 per cent of the land value above the general threshold and $88,036 plus 2 per cent above the premium threshold. The value used is the three-year average of the Valuer General’s unimproved land values, and the threshold applies once to the combined value of all the taxable land you own in NSW, so a second unit is added to the first before anything is tested. Land held in a special or discretionary trust gets no threshold. Surcharge land tax for foreign owners applies to residential land, so a foreign-owned Sydney warehouse pays the ordinary rates.

Computed from the Revenue NSW general and premium rates: $100 plus 1.6 per cent of the value above $1,075,000, and $88,036 plus 2 per cent of the value above $6,571,000. Land in a special or discretionary trust is taxed without the threshold.

GST. The ATO’s GST and property guidance treats a registered vendor’s sale of commercial premises as taxable, so 10 per cent GST sits inside the contract price. A registered purchaser claims it back through the activity statement for the period that includes settlement, so it is timing rather than cost, except that no lender advances it: on the $1.8 million warehouse in the table, $180,000 has to be in the settlement account until the next activity statement. The GST withholding regime for new residential premises does not extend to commercial property. The ATO’s going concern rules make a sale GST-free when four things line up: payment changes hands, the buyer is registered for GST or has to be, both sides have put in writing that the sale is of a going concern, and the vendor hands over everything the enterprise needs and keeps running it until the day of sale. A leased building sold together with its leases can meet that test; an empty building sold on its own does not. Where the vendor applies the margin scheme, the buyer gets no input credit. Your accountant decides which applies, before exchange, because it changes the cash needed on the day.

From leasing to owning: Sydney’s precincts through our suburb pages

The Sydney file we see most often after refinancing is the outer west trades or logistics business that has rented in Eastern Creek, Erskine Park, Prestons or Marsden Park for a decade and wants to own the unit. The credit desk likes it: rent paid on time for years is the repayment in a different column, and a business occupying at least 51 per cent of the floor space is assessed as an owner-occupier, which on a standard industrial unit means up to 80 per cent of valuation. What stops the file is rarely the lender; it is the cash on the day, deposit, duty and GST, which the tables above put in numbers.

These suburbs are now covered on our Sydney mortgage broker page, linked below; the notes map the precincts commercial buyers work in.

• Werrington, in the City of Penrith about 44 kilometres from the GPO: the Erskine Park and St Marys sheds are neighbours and the Western Sydney Airport corridor is next door.
• Riverstone, the north west growth corridor: Marsden Park’s estates, where the Cushman & Wakefield report records the quarter’s strongest fall in leasing availability, are the local industrial market.
• Allawah, on the Illawarra line with Hurstville next door: the Hurstville and Kogarah suites and shopfronts, with Port Botany and Banksmeadow a short drive east.
• Wollstonecraft, on the lower north shore with a quick run to North Sydney and the Pacific Highway: the North Sydney office market and the St Leonards medical precinct are the commercial files here, both priced on the lease before the postcode.
• Manly, the Corso and the ferry: Northern Beaches shopfronts and the Military Road strip, where a tenanted shop and a vacant one are different loans.
• Point Piper, the harbourside eastern suburbs: owners here often fund a CBD strata suite or an Oxford Street shopfront against home equity, and keeping the two loans from being cross-collateralised is the part that needs a former banker.

Home lending in the same suburbs is on our Sydney mortgage broker page, the locations page lists every suburb we cover, and business owners in Victoria have their own Melbourne commercial property loans page.

Queensland buyers have a Brisbane commercial property loans guide of their own, built around Queensland duty, land tax and the industrial land squeeze before the 2032 Games.

Western Australian buyers have a Perth commercial property finance guide, built around WA duty, land tax, MRIT and the Kewdale to Henderson industrial belt.

SMSF purchases and SMSF refinances of Sydney premises

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 26 June 2026, closed residential SMSF borrowing from 10 August 2026: a fund can no longer start a limited recourse borrowing arrangement for a house or unit. What it left open is business real property, the ATO’s term for land and buildings used wholly and exclusively in a business, which is also the carve-out from super’s in-house asset and related party rules. In Sydney that is the Prestons unit, the St Leonards rooms or the Newtown shop, owned by the fund and rented to the members’ own business at a market rent. The full rules are in our SMSF commercial property loans guide and our 10 August explainer.

None of the Big Four writes these loans now. The specialist and non-bank lenders that do cap LVR at an indicative 65 to 75 per cent, generally look for a fund balance somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000, insist on cash left in the fund after settlement, and test serviceability on the fund’s rent and contributions together. The fund pays NSW transfer duty at the general rate with no surcharge, and the bare trust that holds the title during the loan has to be set up before exchange; set it up afterwards and the fund can face a second duty bill. Whether the fund should own the premises at all is advice for a licensed financial adviser and your accountant; our part is the loan, and our super property walkthrough shows where it fits.

The SMSF file that fits this page’s theme is the refinance: an existing SMSF loan, residential or commercial, can move to a better rate or another lender provided the balance does not increase, with the same NSW arithmetic of no duty, two registry dealings and the lender fees. Our SMSF loan refinance guide covers what the specialist lenders ask for.

Interstate and expat buyers

NSW treats an interstate or overseas buyer of commercial property the same as a local. Surcharge purchaser duty is confined to residential-related property and surcharge land tax to residential land, so an Australian in Singapore or Dubai, or a Melbourne investor, buying a Banksmeadow logistics unit pays the general duty rate and ordinary land tax. NSW land tax counts only NSW land, so a Victorian portfolio does not affect the threshold.

The lending is the harder part for expats. Most lenders count around 70 per cent of foreign income once it is converted, up to around 80 per cent for preferred currencies, and the big banks shade harder or decline outright, as our expat home loans guide sets out. On a leased Sydney commercial asset the lease can do the talking instead: an investment facility written on the rent at 60 to 70 per cent of valuation depends less on how a lender reads a Dubai payslip. Nothing requires a flight home: ID checks run over video, the loan documents are e-signed, and PEXA settles the title.

Why a Melbourne-based former banker for a Sydney commercial loan

Everstone Finance works from South Yarra in Melbourne. Its founders, Ahmed Lotfi and Zappelin Heng, wrote and assessed commercial files inside major banks before they became brokers. Sydney clients get the same process as Melbourne clients: a first conversation by video or phone, a short document list uploaded through a secure link, an identity check by video or at Australia Post, e-signing and a PEXA settlement. Files run in English, Arabic or French; the online broker page describes the process.

Distance does not change what matters in commercial lending: the gap between lenders on LVR, covenants, lease reading and industry appetite is wide and none of it is printed on a rate card. Your statement, lease and financials go to a panel of more than 40 bank and non-bank lenders, and you hear back which of them has appetite for a Sydney warehouse, suite or shopfront this quarter. The lender pays us on settlement; if a fee ever applies on a specialist commercial file it is disclosed in writing before you apply, as our guide to what a broker costs explains, and the first conversation costs nothing. We do not quote a rate before we have read the file.

Book a free Sydney commercial refinance or purchase appointment by video with a former banker

Who you will be talking to

The people behind Everstone

Commercial finance is one of the largest decisions a business owner or investor makes. Here is who will actually be working on your file.

Ahmed Lotfi

Mortgage Broker & Co-Founder

A former major bank lender who now works entirely for you. Ahmed runs the file personally: security, structure, lender selection and the negotiation with the commercial credit desk. English, Arabic and French.

Zappelin Heng

Mortgage Broker & Co-Founder

Co-founder with deep lender experience, focused on getting complex and self-employed files assessed on their real strength, not a tick-box, including business owners and investors with multiple securities.

Sydney commercial property loan FAQs

Guides to read before you refinance or sign

• Refinancing a commercial property loan: the process and when it pays.
• Commercial loan refinancing costs: every fee and who charges it.
• Same bank or switch: how to ask your current lender to reprice before you move.
• Commercial property equity release: the ceiling, the limit and the two routes.
• National commercial refinance calculator: the same arithmetic with a term reset.
• SMSF loan refinance: moving an existing fund loan without growing the balance.

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