Forgive me people for I have sinned! It has been far too long since my last confession, sorry, I mean blog post! In the meantime I have been through quite a bit, what with turning 40 yesterday (I know I don’t look it), and experiencing the general ups and downs of life and the mortgage industry, (more in a separate posting).
I have been paying alot of attention to the mortgage and financial press as you would expect, reading with both amusement, hearty agreement and utter despair some of the comments with regards to FSA regulation, self-certification, the behaviour of lenders and brokers, the proposed breakup up of some of our much maligned banking institutions, whilst also watching the pleasing plethora of new rates flooding the market.
Whilst I have been away for a week in the deepest recesses of Longleat Forest, I have been keeping up to date with the various comments by the great and good around the future of Bank Base Rates and mortgage products generally.
There are some very interesting observations to be made around some of the comments made.
Acouple of things have caught my eye this week in terms of mortgage lending institutions. First of all we have the British Banking Association, (BBA), defending the large gaps between LIBOR rates and the product pricing we are seeing, and we also have a Which report on what 2000 of their members say are the best and worst mortgage lenders.
As far as 3 month LIBOR is concerned this was always the reason that lenders used for not lending during the height of the credit crunch when it was artificially high. Now, according to Moneyfacts, “Three-month Libor is at 0.55 per cent, while the average two-year tracker rate is 3.76 per cent. Two-year swaps, which lenders use to fund fixed-rate mortgages, are at 1.84 per cent, compared with the average two-year fixed-rate deal at 5.13 per cent”.
Last week was particularly interesting as HSBC released the latest in their line of headline grabbing products at an extraordinary rate of 1.99%, and I was asked to provide a comment. Comment I did, but I did not quite expect the furore that followed and the attempted rap on the knuckles HSBC themselves gave me.
Just when you thought Big Brother had been cancelled, along came HSBC and within minutes managed to get one of my quotes pulled from a website.
In committing to doing a blog several times a week, the biggest worry is how the hell am I going to find something to write about each time? Since I started the blog a few months before the credit crunch I needn’t have worried, events have been nothing short of sensational and yesterday’s announcement from the Lloyds Banking Group marks another historic landmark.
It is incredibly unfortunate that it has come to this, and great names such as C&G, Abbey, Alliance & Leicester, and Bradford & Bingley disappearing from our high streets is sad to see.
Andrew Montlake, Communications Director at Coreco and ‘Mortgage Personality of the Year 2008’, gives his views — honest and no holds barred — on the latest developments within the mortgage and property markets.
