"Even though we have all been incredibly busy since the beginning of the pandemic, advisers have been able to process more matters efficiently by using the tools at their disposal."
Total mortgage searches in November 2022 were down 13.1% on the prior month, according to mortgage platform data from Twenty7Tec.
Within this total, purchase mortgage searches were down 9.2%, remortgage searches were down 17.1%, and first-time buyer searches fell by 7.2%.
Despite this, November was still the ninth-busiest month ever for total mortgage searches, reaching 85.85% of the high mark set in September 2022 (October and September were the two busiest ever months).
Total searches for fixed products continued to drop in November, but tracker searches more than doubled (up 108%) compared to September 2022.
The data also shows that green mortgages have been less popular over the past two months, which Twenty7Tec says is because green buy-to-let mortgages have been driving growth and total buy-to-let mortgage searches are at their lowest real terms levels in six months.
The average property valuation for purchases (£333,951) was down 1.4% on October and the average loan required (£230,128) was down 1.3%.
For the third month in a row, remortgage ESIS documents produced outnumbered purchase ESIS documents, but the gap is narrowing. The month averaged 54:46 for purchase v remortgages compared to 52:48 in October.
November ended with over 13,000 products and variants available, up 18.98% compared to the end of the prior month.
James Tucker, founder and CEO of Twenty7Tec, said: “Our mission is to remove the wrinkles from the adviser/customer process, to make it as frictionless as possible. Have we succeeded? Well, in 2020, advisers performed on average 5.18 mortgage searches per ESIS document they created. That’s a lot of hustle. By 2021, this dropped to 4.02 searches per ESIS document and in 2022, despite the varying rates and greater market uncertainty, this dropped again to 4.001 searches per document.
“What’s clear is that even though we have all been incredibly busy since the beginning of the pandemic, advisers have been able to process more matters efficiently by using the tools at their disposal.
“It's not mission accomplished, but we're definitely on track.”
