What Is An Ungeared Unit Trust?

An Ungeared Unit Trust may or may not be perfect for your development or your property holding, but it does allow multiple owners, including super (even your own super).

It allows holding an asset; so you can buy a property, but it cannot have a mortgage. You can’t secure any debt on the property that you purchased – and that’s the whole reason why it’s called “ungeared”, which means you have to fund 100% of it. This could be through your own money outside of super, or it could, in some cases, be a superannuation that you use – but with this type of trust, you cannot run a business. 

So this is the reason why we don’t really use them for property developments, because there’s a chance that we could be considered to be running a business of property development. If we do that, this structure then blows your super fund up, and we don’t want to do that.

Let’s say we have a client that has a bit of money in super, a bit of money outside of super, and they want to buy a residential or commercial property to rent out without using any bank funding. This is a structure that we might use for that, for a longer term buy and hold rental property – but it’s a bit difficult to do full on property development with it.