Hair and beauty salon property finance

Ardent Capital Group brings the same method to every client: execution and strategy, clear advice for smart lending, and long-term growth. That means the right lender, structure and timing, straight advice so you borrow with confidence, and today's deal built toward where you want to be tomorrow. We are specialists in helping business owners secure finance to purchase their own property, and we understand the complex structures that often sit around it, including multiple trusts, holding companies and self-managed super funds. A working salon runs on its chairs, fit-out and the high street frontage your walk-ins depend on, so we take your figures to lenders who understand the trade and structure the mortgage to suit. As the salon expands or you look at a second site, we are still here to help you fund it. Every figure is subject to serviceability, lender appetite and approval.

Standard commercial security like a salon shop typically gears to 75% to 80% of the property value. Add equity from a property you already own and a cross-collateralised structure can reach up to 100% of the purchase price. The exact number depends on your file, so talk to us.

No, and this is the most common misconception we correct. A salon shop is standard commercial security, in the same bucket as an office or a warehouse. It is valued on comparable sales and the rent it could command, not on what your business earns. That is quite different from a pub, a motel or a service station, where the property and the trade are valued as one thing and the lending gears lower as a result. Being in the standard bucket is why a salon freehold borrows further than most owners expect.

Because a salon carries far more behind the walls than a plain shop does. Basins and backwash units need supply and waste, a full day of washing needs serious hot water capacity, wet areas need waterproofing, the floor needs drainage that can carry the load, and colour, keratin, acrylic and solvent work needs mechanical extraction and ventilation. That is real infrastructure and a real investment, and it is why the fit-out is the biggest cheque a salon owner writes, and why it deserves to be funded properly rather than squeezed into the property loan.

Separately from the property, and that is deliberate. The fit-out is most of what you are paying for and it is the least of what a lender will secure, because the property values on comparable sales like any other shop and the basins and chairs do not lift that valuation. The next tenant rips them out. So the premises carry a property facility, and the fit-out is funded on its own: equipment finance or a chattel mortgage over the chairs, basins, backwash units, styling stations and any laser, IPL or treatment equipment, and a business loan or a progress-drawn facility over the building works, the plumbing and the extraction. Splitting them keeps the property loan clean, usually improves the rate on it, and gets the whole salon funded rather than half of it.

They look straight through it. Renting a chair to an independent stylist, or a room to a therapist or a massage practitioner, is a licence to occupy rather than a sublease, so it is licence fee income, not rental income. A credit team reads it as thinner and less secure than the income you earn from your own service book, because a stylist can give notice and walk out with the clients. No lender publishes a policy on this, so anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. What we can tell you is how credit teams actually read it, and they discount it. We present the income mix the way an assessor will read it anyway, with trading income and licence fee income set out separately, so the chair-rental line does not undermine a file that is otherwise strong.

Fitting out a leased shop means spending the biggest cheque in the business on an improvement your landlord ends up owning, while you keep paying rent for the privilege of using it. Buying the premises changes that completely. The rent you stop paying to a landlord is added back when a lender tests whether you can service the loan, the fixed improvements are yours, and the property values on comparable sales and achievable rent like any other shop, so it sits in the lending bucket that gears higher. That is the whole argument for buying, and for most salon owners it is a stronger one than they expect.

Yes, but on a different page. A doctor-led or nurse-led medical cosmetic clinic is assessed differently to a beauty-led business, because the licensing, the equipment and the professional structure behind it change how a lender reads the file. This page covers the beauty-led side: hair salons, barbershops, nail salons, beauty salons, day spas, massage clinics, brow and lash bars and tanning salons. If your business is a medical cosmetic or skin clinic, see our cosmetic and skin clinic finance page under medical and allied health.

For a full-doc application, most lenders want two to three years of business financial statements and tax returns, personal tax returns for all guarantors, the contract of sale, the current lease, and booking-system or point-of-sale reports showing the revenue mix across services, retail product and any chair or room rental. Written chair and room licence agreements help the read considerably. Plenty of salon owners do not fit a standard full-doc assessment neatly. Alt-doc and low-doc routes exist, supported by an accountant’s declaration, BAS lodgements and business bank statements, at a slightly higher rate. We work through your income situation upfront to identify the best approach.

Yes, it is possible, and we arrange these. Retail premises sit comfortably inside an SMSF purchase, more comfortably than most asset classes. It is also one of the more intricate purchases in commercial finance, and the detail is what decides whether it works. The fund borrows under a limited recourse borrowing arrangement, so the salon sits in a separate holding trust and the lender can only come after that one property. From 10 August 2026 a new arrangement can only be used for business real property. A shop trading wholly as a business qualifies, and it does not matter whether you or a tenant runs it. A shop with a flat above it on the same title generally does not, which catches a lot of the shop-top strip retail on the market. Your operating company leases the salon back from the fund, in writing, at market rent supported by an independent appraisal, and the rent has to actually be paid. Cross-collateralisation is not available inside super, so the fund needs its own deposit and the 100% LVR structures described elsewhere on this page do not work here. Lenders cap SMSF lending below a standard purchase, generally between 65% and 80%, and want cash left in the fund after settlement. We know this sounds complicated. It is, and that is exactly why we do it every day. Reach out to our team and we will guide you through the entire process. We structure the finance, tell you which lenders will take a salon as SMSF security and on what terms, and bring in the SMSF specialists and licensed advisers who set the fund side up. You will not be working it out on your own. Get that right and it is a solid, compliant structure.

Then there is no property for a lender to mortgage, and it becomes a different kind of loan. You are buying goodwill, fit-out, equipment and stock, along with the right to occupy under a lease, so the funding comes from your cash flow, from security you already hold, and from equipment finance over the plant. The loan term is also capped by the years left on the lease, so the more time your lease has to run, the longer the loan can be. We can arrange this, and we will tell you plainly which parts of it are fundable before you spend money on due diligence.

It depends on your state, and the rule most people repeat is wrong. There is no statutory minimum term in New South Wales, where it was repealed in 2017, or in Queensland, which never had one. Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT, the Northern Territory and Tasmania each set a five year default, and even there it can be waived by certificate. If you are buying a business rather than the freehold, what matters commercially is not the statutory minimum but how many years you actually have left, because that caps your loan term. It also decides whether a fit-out is worth paying for at all.

Often, yes. A decline usually means the salon went to a lender whose appetite did not match it, not that the business is unfundable. Common causes are a credit team treating a salon as a specialised trading asset when it is standard commercial security, and an income mix that was presented without the chair rental line being explained. Non-bank and specialist lenders assess retail differently and several publish an LVR the majors will not commit to in writing. We will give you a straight answer on whether it is fundable elsewhere.

Going direct means one lender’s appetite and one set of criteria. In this sector the spread between lenders is unusually wide: the majors do not publish an owner-occupier commercial LVR at all, while several non-banks publish 75% to 80% in their product guides, and the loan terms differ by more than a decade. On top of that, the fit-out has to be funded on a separate facility and the income mix has to be presented properly. A specialist broker knows which lenders are genuinely writing retail this quarter and how each one reads a salon. Presenting a salon to the wrong credit team is how a fundable purchase gets declined.

Most of the time, no. We are paid a commission by the lender once your loan settles. Where a purchase requires significant preparation, a small mandate fee may apply, and we will always be upfront about this before work begins.

Although we are based in Sydney, we service clients across all major Australian cities, including Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart, along with their surrounding regional areas. Wherever your salon is located, we can arrange your finance.

Although our main speciality is property loans for business owners, we also assist with salon fit-out finance and working capital for salon owners. On asset finance, that covers salon chairs, basins and backwash units, styling stations, dryers and trolleys, nail bars and pedicure spas, massage and treatment tables, tanning beds, laser, IPL and skin treatment equipment, and the booking and point-of-sale system. On working capital, we arrange business overdrafts, lines of credit and cash-flow funding to carry retail stock, to fund a refit between trading peaks, and to cover wages through a quiet month.

Yes. That is our core ethos, helping you understand the right strategy, structure and clear advice from the very first conversation. Our main borrower profiles are salon owners and retail owner-occupiers seeking finance from $100,000 upwards, and buying the shop you already trade from is very often a first commercial purchase, so it is well within our wheelhouse. We will walk you through what the property will actually value at, how the fit-out gets funded, and the deposit you will genuinely need, before you commit to anything.