Incoming National Australia Bank chief executive Ross McEwan looking for a place to call home

Ross McEwan coming in as group chief executive officer and managing director of National Australia Bank. Stuart McEvoy.

Everything is falling into place for incoming National Australia Bank chief executive officer Ross McEwan.

On Wednesday, Phil Chronican, who will move from his current gig as interim CEO to chair the bank’s board after McEwan starts on December 2, cleared the decks for his star hire with a $1.1bn second-half profit downgrade.

The bad news — mostly for compensation costs from the Hayne royal commission — sent NAB stock down 2.3 per cent.

It also helpfully dropped the bar against which McEwan and Chronican will be measured in their new roles.

McEwan, a Kiwi like his soon to be chair, has been running Royal Bank of Scotland from its head office in Edinburgh while living in London (home of RBS’ biggest shareholder, the UK government).

Before that McEwan, 62, ran the retail operation at the Commonwealth Bank, back when another Kiwi, Ralph Norris, was in charge.

McEwan set off for the UK after Ian Narev, another Kiwi, beat him as Norris’s CBA successor.

Despite his relocation, McEwan maintained a foothold in the luxury Sydney real estate market for more than a decade with a three-bedroom waterfront apartment in Pyrmont for which the banker and wife Stephanie McEwan paid $2.1m in 2008.

But in a freak coincidence of timing, McEwan put his Sydney pad on the market a fortnight before he announced on April 25 that he had resigned from RBS. What are the chances?

Property records unearthed by Margin Call show it sold for $3.225m in May — two months before the Sydney-based Chronican officially told the market he had snared McEwan to run the Melbourne-headquartered NAB

As far as we can see, the McEwans are yet to invest in what will be their new home city.

But armed with their Pyrmont proceeds and with Philip Lowe helpfully chopping interest rates, it looks like that’s being prepared for them as well.