The Commonwealth Bank has delivered a record $5.45bn half-year cash profit, as investors pile into the housing market and take market share from owner-occupiers.
Australia’s biggest lender said on Wednesday it was settling more than 3,000 housing loans on average every week, with property prices now at or near record highs across large parts of the country.
CBA data shows that residential investment lending is particularly strong, with investors accounting for 43% of new business, up from 37% of the portfolio two years ago. At the same time, lending to owner-occupiers has decreased as a percentage of its loan book.
Investors who have already built up equity in their housing portfolios are routinely winning bidding wars against first home buyers in a tight market, expanding the wealth divide that is fraying relations between the generations.
Shares in CBA rocketed on Wednesday, lifting more than 7% after the bank released its earnings for the six-month period, with traders upbeat about the strong growth in residential and business lending.
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In a call with investors, the CBA chief executive Matt Comyn said home loan balances had increased by 7% in the past year to $622bn and that 97% of these customers also held a CBA transaction account.
CBA’s cash profit was up 6% from a year ago, beating expectations. The bank announced an interim $2.35 dividend, up 10c from a year ago.
The bank reported a decrease in the number of people falling behind in their mortgage repayments as a percentage of its total mortgage book, after last year’s three interest rate reductions and tax cuts eased household pressure.
The arrears level is still elevated and the impact of last week’s rate hike is yet to hit mortgages.
The bank’s bumper profits prompted criticism from the Finance Sector Union, which has complained that the bank’s workers are subject to rising workloads and are anxious over an increase in automated processes.
The union said it had surveyed more than 1,700 CBA workers and found 72% were worried about their ongoing job security, mainly due to offshoring and the “rapid expansion” of artificial intelligence.
RBA ‘missed’ loan boom
CBA’s rising investor lending reflects a nationwide trend as banks pursue the customers described by rival bank Westpac as “attractive”.
Investors accounted for two in five home loans issued in the last three months of 2025, receiving 60,445 loans totalling a record near-$43bn, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
That exceeded the 57,282 loans that went to existing owner-occupiers and was nearly double the number of first home buyer loans, which still picked up to 31,783, supported by the government’s 5% deposit scheme.
Lending surged far more than the Reserve Bank expected after 2025’s interest rate cuts, the RBA deputy governor, Andrew Hauser, said on Wednesday.
Loans had remained accessible even after the central bank recognised lending was too cheap and hiked interest rates last week, Hauser told an Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry lunch.
“Credit growth has been … part of the stuff, I would say, that policymakers may have missed slightly,” he said.
“Some [financial conditions] remain on the accommodative side … [but] the higher cash rate in due course should feed through.”
Further limits on borrowing, announced by the prudential regulator last year, came into force on 1 February, capping banks’ new loans to customers with high debt-to-income ratios of 20% of their total new lending. Hauser cheered the move, calling it “smart design”.
“What it says to the banks is: ‘Go ahead and lend now, it’s absolutely fine, but be aware, we made a judgment that … credit growth could get to a level where it in fact becomes unsustainable.’”
