Home owners who are in between selling one property and buying the next might find they need a higher deposit.

Ahead of tougher new borrowing restrictions, a mortgage brokerage says home owners risk missing out on their new homes if they can't get bridging finance under upcoming loan restrictions.

Sarah Johnston of mortgage advisers Mortgage Express said banks and other lenders were proving reluctant to approve open-ended bridging finance for home owners ahead of tighter loan-to-value ratio (LVR) restrictions in September.

She said that if the owners were needing finance between buying their new home and selling their old one, they were being classified as property investors, requiring them to have a 40 per cent deposit for the second house.

The rule changes are aimed at property investors; most home buyers will continue to only need 20 per cent equity in their new property.

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Johnston said that if bridging finance was not included in the new LVR rules, it was open to some abuse. Home owners could simply say they had been unable to sell the house and were keeping it, to avoid being classed as an investor.

"It's very unclear and until that loophole is fixed there are legitimate owner-occupiers who are being shut of out the market, because the banks haven't been given clarification on how to apply the new rules in a 'buy before selling' situation."

Another broker, Sam Collins, of Loan Market in Wellington, agreed there had been some conflicting advice about how the banks were applying the rules ahead of the Reserve Bank restrictions.

But in most cases it was just making loan applications slower to get through.

"Of course,we're having more clients come to us and say, hey we talked to the banks, they weren't sure what was going on, can you guys give us a hand?"

He did agree, though, that owners of two homes ran the risk of being viewed as investors unless they were clearly close to selling one.

"If, say, you'd bought your second property and you're in the process of marketing your existing property ... most banks would apply some common sense.

"However, if it was more of a, hey we're going to sell this property eventually, absolutely that would be classified as an investment property."

James Lockie of General Finance said his firm offered bridging finance and had not made any change to its criteria..

"It might be that bridging finance is more difficult in the trading bank environment. The trading banks have tended not like those sorts of loans anyway because they're short-term in nature and banks are really set up to do 25-year residential mortgages."

Harcourts NZ chief executive Chris Kennedy called for the LVR restrictions for home owner/occupiers to be clarified for lenders immediately.

"In an extremely competitive market, homeowners often find themselves trying to buy before they sell to avoid missing out on their dream home.

"At the moment the situation around borrowing seems extremely messy and unclear. We've always been pretty sceptical that the new LVR ratios for investors would slow down the market as planned.