Home Owner Loan Availability Increases
Following the effects of the credit crunch and banking crisis, the home owner loan and mortgage market have suffered greatly with lack of loan availability and much tighter lending criteria.
As the market slowly starts to recover, we have seen a steady increase in the number of loan products which have become available, both for home owner loans and secured loans, although underwriting criteria for any loans still remains extremely tight.
New figures from the intermediary loan sourcing system, Mortgage Brain, have shown that the total number of home owner loan products available on the market has now grown to 7,654 by the 1st November this year, which is the highest number of loan products for the past two years.
Over the course of the past twelve months alone, the number of different loan products has increased by 4,432, showing an overall increase of 138 per cent during this period.
The new loan products have been spread fairly evenly between variable rate loans, fixed rates and tracker rate loans.
Whilst this is obviously good news for the home owner loan market and it is nice to see an increase in loan product numbers, we are still a long way from pre credit crunch conditions, when a potential borrower had more than 30,000 different loan products to choose from, including self certification loans and adverse credit loans.
Mark Lofthouse of Mortgage Brain said “The data from this month’s analysis is very encouraging and is a further indication of the positive direction in which the market seems to be heading.”
“Overall product availability is at its highest level in over 24 months. fixed rates are back on the rise again and if variable rate products continue their current form they could soon bear witness to 12 consecutive monthly increases, which would be a fantastic achievement.”
