Podcast

Fixing housing affordability: eight Australian founders on getting people into homes.

September 30, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In August and September 2025, Fintech Chatter ran a series on the Australian fintech and proptech founders working to fix housing affordability. Dexter planned a single episode. So many founders put their hands up that it became eight.

Each founder attacks a different part of the problem. Several start with the deposit barrier, which Lucinda Hartley of Zeroo says now takes an average family more than a decade to clear. Others focus on the supply already built, with Mark Macduffie of Downsizer and Dean Fraser of BrickFloor both citing 13 million spare bedrooms sitting empty in Australian homes each night. Here is what each of the eight is building, with every episode to play below.

1. Zeroo, zero deposit home loans.

Lucinda Hartley spent her career as an urban designer before co-founding Zeroo, formerly Mondus Capital, a zero deposit mortgage for first home buyers and owner occupiers. “It’s now likely to take you over a decade to save for a deposit,” she says. Zeroo co-invests alongside the buyer in a shared equity model, and the owner keeps full title. After four or five years, the buyer refinances Zeroo’s contribution out of the capital growth.

Zeroo has settled its first 20 home loans on the back of a $100 million debt facility with Brisbane lender WLTH, which holds the primary and secondary mortgage in one blended loan. Its customers are mostly first home buyers in their thirties and forties who have been saving for years.

2. OwnHome, funding the deposit.

James Bowe, CEO and co-founder of OwnHome, funds deposits so families can buy a home sooner, and adds advocacy support through the buying journey. He argues that credit risk assessment should consider more than the size of a buyer’s deposit, and that lenders mortgage insurance is a significant profit pool for banks. Listen to the full episode with James Bowe.

3. Frontya, doubling the deposit.

Nir Golan and Robbie Baskin of Frontya start from the view that property investors amplify the challenges first home buyers face. Frontya’s funding model aims to double a first home buyer’s deposit. On the other side of the market, it runs a managed fund for property investors that spreads their risk while supporting first home buyers.

4. Downsizer, freeing up existing homes.

Mark Macduffie describes Downsizer as “a real combination of insurance and property and fintech”. It lets asset-rich baby boomers buy their next home with zero cash deposit, using an insurance bond in place of a loan. Mark says Downsizer holds data on 1.9 million homeowners who want to downsize, and about 68% of them want to move within two years.

Downsizer has sold $168 million of property off the plan, and about 20% of its transactions now come from parents helping their children buy. One win took 18 months, spent removing a special condition that developers had copied from contract to contract for more than a decade. “Housing affordability is not a solo sport,” Mark says.

5. Co-Operty, co-owning on title.

Lynda Coker co-founded Co-Operty to make co-ownership of property simple for friends, flatmates and families. Buyers hold their shares on title as tenants in common, so the shares can be unequal. Parents can co-buy alongside their child instead of gifting the deposit, which cuts what the child borrows and protects the parents’ money.

Co-Operty launched a little over a year ago and learned quickly that “we were not solving the real problem, which was improving access to finance.” It now works with two non-bank lenders that assess parent and child together as one borrower, and it distributes through mortgage brokers and property developers.

6. Our Leg Up, replacing the guarantor.

Michael Ragavan is building “Australia’s surrogate bank of mum and dad”. Buyers with a 5% deposit get the interest rate of a 20% deposit and avoid lenders mortgage insurance. Property owners back those loans as an investment product and earn a return on equity they can’t otherwise access, without putting in any cash.

After the Hayne Royal Commission restricted guarantors to immediate family, Michael saw that about 40% of Australians had no parent able to help. It took 18 months and about 10 law firms to prove the structure works under prudential standards. Our Leg Up has passed lender due diligence and is preparing to pilot with a couple of lenders.

7. OSQO, bringing debt online.

Stuart McGregor, CEO of OSQO, is using blockchain technology to bring debt online, which he calls the last part of finance yet to be adapted for the internet. OSQO starts with deposit gap loans, which connect capital with buyers who need help with their deposit.

8. BrickFloor, certainty for home sellers.

Dean Fraser’s BrickFloor guarantees a floor price for home sellers before they list. If no buyer beats the guarantee, BrickFloor buys the home into its property fund and rents it out. Dean says sellers who sell to a third party achieve on average an 8% higher price, because agents use the guarantee to push buyers higher.

In one Glen Iris sale, BrickFloor guaranteed $2.35 million. The auction drew a single bid at $2.2 million, and two weeks later the agent took a buyer to $2.4 million. Dean now wants to extend the guarantee to developers’ house and land lots and launch a retail investment app, so young buyers can save their first home deposit through the fund.

What the founders have in common.

Most of the eight described the same obstacles. Lucinda, Michael and Dean each described how long a housing product takes to prove, and how hard that makes raising capital from Australian investors. Lucinda notes that venture funds set up as an ESVCLP are effectively barred from investing in regulated lenders, and Mark and Lynda both spent months persuading lenders, conveyancers and brokers to change processes that predate their products.

Which of these ideas would have got you into your first home sooner?