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How specialist lenders are helping on your mortgage journey
The UK housing market has frequently proven its appeal and resilience in various ways. Inevitably, there are periods when it will come under greater scrutiny in terms of price, supply and activity.
Currently, questions remain over the impact of escalating living costs, rising interest rates and mortgage rates which have increased in recent months to reflect upward swap rate movement.
Recent announcements over the new energy price caps and how much people are likely to be affected over the rest of 2022 and into 2023 have also served to increase the pressure on households and make us assess our regular and irregular outgoings.
It’s clear that this combination will affect activity levels and lending figures to an extent in Q3 and Q4 but it’s also wise to point out that we are operating from some very solid foundations. This was evident from the figures from Q2 and July, which demonstrated how the housing and mortgage markets have continued to outperform many expectations.
This represents some highly positive statistics, although this does not trivialise the role of rising inflation and growing affordability constraints facing many potential borrowers.
As new and existing borrowers’ financial circumstances change, the mortgage journey will become more complex. This will have a greater emphasis on specialist residential lenders and a manual underwriting process which has the ability to take a holistic approach when assessing individual circumstances. This approach allows lenders to support credit-worthy borrowers and make more flexible and responsible lending decisions going forward.
Simplifying the mortgage process and maintaining the highest possible service standards – for clients and intermediary partners in their homebuying or remortgage journey remain key and this is present in an intermediary marketplace which has seen a few lending issues in recent weeks.
The aforementioned concerns are likely to result in existing and potential homeowners being pushed beyond traditional lending boundaries and automated underwriting requirements. Thankfully, a growing number of specialist lenders are providing an array of solutions which meet a range of property-related needs and financial expectations.
George Gee, Managing Director (Commercial) at Foundation Home Loans
*This article was originally published on The Intermediary
FOR INTERMEDIARIES ONLY
