Recent Survey Reveals UK Mortgage Applications Enjoying Upward Movement
The Coreco Group along with the Mortgage Advice Bureau have released data regarding mortgage applications for the month of March. Compared with March of 2010, the housing market enjoyed a significant increase in mortgage applications of 20%. Less than impressive, but still in double digits was the comparison of February to March. The increase month to month was almost 12%. Remortgage applications cooled off quite a bit. A month to month comparison revealed a 1.9% decrease.
Fixed rate deals, and not variable rate deals, were the overwhelming deal of choice for 80% of those who applied for new mortgages. Compared with February, the average loan size inched higher by 3.3% to 127,546 pounds. LTV, or loan to value, fell a couple of percentage points to 69.9%. Regions continued to vary in the amount of activity they each experienced. While mortgage applications increased by a third in the South West region of the UK, the same could surely not be said for the North West region. The area saw a contradictory decrease of more than 6%. Mortgage approvals were not part of the survey by the Coreco Group and the Mortgage Advice Bureau. It is unclear whether UK lenders reacted in a positive way to an increase in demand from borrowers. Up to the time of the survey, remortgage figures were strong and seemed to begin gathering more momentum. This is not a surprise, as homeowners who have sufficient equity are trying to remortgage in order to save money in the long run after the increase in base rate.