Australia’s biggest bank has hired hundreds of people to keep up with a deluge of home loan applications, as property industry veterans say bank pre-approval delays mean buyers are missing out. Commonwealth Bank has hired about 400 new staff and has told AAP its workers are doing thousands of hours of overtime to keep up with loan requests. “The exponential growth in home loan application volumes has placed considerable pressure on our support teams and operations,” the CBA said in a statement. The bank says it’s kept pre-approval times down to two days over the last three months but some more complicated applications are taking longer. And it’s not alone. Fellow ‘Big Four’ member ANZ says increases in response times have been as true for itself as for most major lenders. “ANZ continues to increase its processing capacity through a combination of actions including increasing the number of skilled assessors …