The 2017 Mortgage Market has been a little strange for us. The first 3 months started very slowly and in fact it was the worst quarter we have had since starting up in 2013. That all changed from April onwards where it picked up and the market never slowed down. September was the busiest month we have ever had and December was better than the last 3 or 4 Decembers combined.
Overall we have written more Mortgages this year than any year before, last year we wrote just over £5m in Mortgage, this year we wrote in excess of £6m and we still have a couple of Mortgages to do before the end of the year.
What have we noticed?
During the 2017 Mortgage Market we had more enquiries from “older” borrowers, those who are in their 50s or older, with the oldest being in his 80s! Some of them we have been able to place on the high street and others have been with much smaller lenders who take an individual approach when underwriting an application.
We have also had a slight increase in enquiries from those with bad credit (defaults, CCJs etc) as this is our main client base and has been for 4 years, it is no surprise that we get a lot of these types of enquiries, but it appears there is no slow down companies issuing Defaults and CCJs. The one thing we have noticed on this front however is that we are getting a lot more of these cases through on the high street than ever before and those that we can not place on the high street, a large proportion are being placed at a rate of around 3.5% of below.
The adverse Mortgage market has massively opened up in the last 12-18 months and there is a big appetite from lenders to accept this sort of business which has meant interest rates on average have dropped significantly.
It almost feels like there has never been a better time to get a Mortgage for those of you with bad credit – from a rate perspective.
The BoE rate rise
I could hardly write this post without acknowledging the Bank of England rate rise earlier this year. It was interesting to see how this all panned out, many of the larger lenders began to increase their rates a week or 2 before the official announcement. Within a week or 2 of the announcement, we started to notice some lenders began reducing their rates, some lenders reduced their rates after the announcement without an increase beforehand. So it seems in general there was not a huge increase following the rate rise overall.