This year has been a very unusual one for us. As a general rule of thumb, over the last 5 years we have started to see a trend of when we will be busy and when we will be quiet and with this we can plan holidays and when we do work on our systems and process etc.
2018 Mortgage market to date
This year has been anything but normal. The term Feast or Famine springs to mind. Early in the year we had quiet periods, which we put down to the snow (seems like years ago now doesnt it?) in February we wrote double the amount of business as we normally do, but it was all done in the early part of February and then it died off. This carried through to March which was also quiet.
April went busy and May was along the lines of what we expected (hoorah, a “normal” month!). Then it died off again in June and early July, it actually died off that much we were beginning to wonder what we had done wrong. It was only towards the end of July we realised it was down to the World Cup. The week after England lost to Croatia through to now, we have been very very busy.
What have we noticed?
A couple of things:
- The World Cup is bad for business! Or more importantly, England doing well in the World Cup is bad for business. Thankfully/Unfortunately, we do not do well in the World Cup very often so I do not expect to worry about this too much.
- We are currently on the 20th August and despite 6 weeks or so for the World Cup being very quiet, we have submitted on over £6.5m in Mortgages – more than we did in the whole of 2017! To me that means despite what is happening with Brexit (or not), the Mortgage market is actually still very much alive.
- I have also read that house prices are staying flat/dropping. Personally, I have not seen that, although we do have a small market share and I suspect a lot of those drops are coming from London and the South East where only a small part of our customers come from.
Going forward?
We still have a lot of enquiries coming through and people looking to buy later in the year (September/October time), so it seems like the market will remain strong for the rest of the year.