For months, "wait and see" was a reasonable position. It isn't anymore.
Westpac's chief economist Luci Ellis this week abandoned the bank's call for a further rate hike, joining CBA, NAB and ANZ in a unanimous verdict: the cash rate has peaked at 4.35%, and the next move is down. That's the first time all four majors have agreed on direction in years.
What changed their minds? One decimal place.
The number that killed the hike case
The ABS Q2 CPI print came in at 3.8%, down from 4.0%. The trimmed mean - the RBA's preferred measure - was 0.8% quarter-on-quarter against an expected 0.9%. That 0.1 percentage point miss was enough to pull the hike argument off the table entirely.
Core inflation is still running at 3.6%, well above the RBA's 2-3% target band. Nobody serious is calling cuts imminent. Canstar's Sally Tindall has been direct: cuts are far on the horizon, with some bank forecasts pointing to 2027 before any meaningful easing arrives. We're not telling you rates are falling now - they're not.
What has changed is the direction of the next move. That matters more than you might think.
The lenders aren't waiting for the RBA
Five lenders have already cut 26 variable rates in the past week. Quietly, without press releases. Canstar is describing it as the start of a price war for good borrowers.
This is how it always starts. The majors reach consensus on direction. Smaller lenders move first to capture market share. The competition heats up. Pricing sharpens. The window for the best rates tends to open before the RBA makes its move official - not after.
The RBA's next board meeting is 10-11 August 2026, with a decision announced 11 August. As of publication, no decision has been made. But the direction has been set by the people who price money for a living.
What this means if you're buying commercial property
Commercial property finance is almost entirely priced off variable or short-term fixed rates. When the rate environment shifts - even in expectation - a few things happen fast:
- Lender appetite for commercial deals improves. Credit teams get more aggressive on pricing when they're not worried about another hike eroding security values.
- Serviceability calculations start moving in your favour. Debt coverage ratios that didn't stack up six months ago might stack up now.
- Asset values firm up. Commercial property markets price off yield expectations, and yield expectations are directly tied to where rates are going.
None of this is a guarantee. Commercial deals live or die on the specific numbers - the lease terms, the tenant quality, the LVR, the trading history behind it. But the macro headwind you've been fighting for two years just turned into a tailwind. That's worth acting on.
The real cost of waiting
If you've been holding off on a purchase, a refinance or an acquisition because you wanted to "see what the RBA does" - you now have your answer. All four majors have told you what they think happens next. Lenders are already repricing in that direction. The certainty you were waiting for is here.
The risk now isn't that rates go higher. The risk is that you wait for cuts that are 12-24 months away, while the good deals get picked up by buyers who read the same signals you just read and moved faster.
We work across the full commercial property lender panel - banks, non-banks, private credit - and we're already seeing competitive appetite return to sectors that were frozen out for the better part of two years. If there's a deal you've been sitting on, now is a reasonable time to pick it up and run the numbers properly.
Call us. We'll tell you straight whether it stacks up - and if it does, we'll fight to get it approved.