Royle says mortgage stress, which is defined as mortgage payments more than three months in arrears, is rising. At the peak of the GFC mortgage stress was at 1.2% of the country’s total mortgage book. Today it is tracking at 0.4%.

However, what he has seen in the past or two or three months, is people have come to the end of their tether. “Interest rates are not going to come down anytime soon and after Christmas and New Year it is going to hard for a lot of people. I am expecting another wave of mortgagee sales in the New Year, unfortunately.

He says while ilender has some great products to restructure mortgage lending for borrowers, all they really do is buy people time when it is probably time to sell up in the normal way.

The common theme so far this year in mortgagee sales has been predominantly self-employed people who been the victim of another company collapse, Royle says.

He had a recent case of an architect who came unstuck when two buildings companies went under owing him $180,000. He couldn’t pay his bills.

Royle says he has never seen a bank move so quickly and put the architect’s home under mortgagee sale, even though his house was worth about $4 million and he had a $1 million loan.

Even though the architect buried his head in the same for some time, Royle was able to get him an emergency loan, which will cost the best part of $100,000, and saved his house. “The architect now has new work contracts, which means he can go back to a bank in about six months and get a new mortgage.

Royle says his business has been doing quite a bit of work like this recently.