Huge demand for housing and mortgages pushing up the cost of borrowing
With a reported 80% of all new mortgages being agreed for property purchases, there is a huge demand for expert advice as buyers seek prompt mortgage offers.
The banks and building societies have lent record amounts of money in recent months, but they have struggled to process mortgage applications. The ongoing pandemic has forced most lenders to tell the majority of their staff to work from home and have meetings online rather than face-to-face.
Halifax for Intermediaries is the latest bank to increase its mortgage rates with unusually high rises of up to 0.61%. The move follows Nationwide Building Society's rate hike of up to 0.35% for new customers and 0.55% for existing borrowers.
Aaron Strutt, product director at Trinity Financial, says: "The lenders have been raising their property purchase rates because they are worried about processing delays, but they are also leapfrogging each other, so they do not top the mortgage best buy tables. They do not want more applications than they can handle and they can't sustain undercutting their competitors for long.
"While it may not sound great that rates are going up, they are still very cheap, and the alternative is the lenders adjust their acceptance criteria and make it harder to qualify for mortgages. Nationwide has already reduced the availability of its 10% deposit rates by limiting its products to houses rather than flats. Barclays has also capped income multiples to 4.49 times salary, rather than the 5.5 times income brokers have had access to for years.
The lenders have access to ultra-cheap through the Bank of England's Term Fund Scheme for SME's, and by putting their rates up they will earn more money, but they are also putting provisions aside, so they have funds in case house prices come down, or arrears rise.
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