As I write this blog, the sun is shining and all is well in the world!
And the same process appears to be happening in the mortgage market, with the doom and gloom news stories of the winter giving way to more upbeat headlines.
For example, the Bank of England has confirmed that the number of loan approvals for house purchase rose to 58,728 in January, up 30% year-on-year and the highest level since December 2009. The Bank of England’s data also confirms that gross mortgage lending of £12.8bn in January was up 9.2% year-on-year. Which is good news indeed.
Hometrack’s latest housing survey shows an 18% monthly increase in the number of new buyers registering with estate agents in February. The number of property listings was also up by 15% and the number of agreed sales jumped by an impressive 35.7%.
Now that is something to get excited about.
I’m not fooling myself into believing that a couple of positive statistics mean that the bad times are behind us and it’s plain sailing from here on in. The UK economy is still fragile and vulnerable to problems in the Eurozone and homeowners continue to be concerned about issues such as job security and rising living costs.
But, none-the-less, the picture is better than it was just a few months ago. None of us thought there would be a sudden upturn in fortunes and we realised that a recovery was likely to be long and slow, but perhaps what we’re now experiencing is the start of that recovery process. In fact, I would argue that it’s in no-one’s interests for the market to suddenly swing from one extreme to another; slow and steady is just what the doctor ordered.
All of which means that March is a good time for both lenders and intermediaries to give their propositions a bit of a Spring spruce-up. As a lender, I can confirm that we’re looking at ways to enhance our product and service proposition and Aldermore has already confirmed that we’ve got some exciting developments on the drawing board to provide further support to first-time buyers and to ensure our criteria is as accommodating as possible.
Intermediaries may also want to review their product and service offering and, perhaps even more importantly, recontact clients who may have been reluctant to consider refinancing over the past couple of years. Brokers may find that clients are now more willing to remortgage or lock into one of the competitive fixed rate deals that are currently on offer, before the inevitable increase in bank base rate does eventually happen.
One swallow certainly doesn’t make a summer but it’s good to see, at long-last, that Spring is finally in the air.
