Something to feel good about: Mortgage rates are falling

If the January blues are getting you down, here’s a little bit of good news – mortgage rates are coming back down.

At the beginning of the year, we started to receive a high number of calls from mortgage lenders saying that they were bringing their rates down for both fixed rate and tracker mortgages and the rates have continued to fall throughout January.

So, while the Bank of England’s base rate is expected to continue to rise and people are still feeling the effects of the highest inflation we have seen in years, lenders are clearly feeling more confident about the markets. It’s not the usual way things work, but then we have come to expect the unexpected these days. The move will thankfully go some way to making house buying  more affordable, following the mortgage price hikes that resulted from the September mini-Budget.

Relieving the stress of affordability

But that’s not the only bit of good news where mortgages are concerned. The affordability stress testing, which goes on in the background, has also eased on both residential and buy-to-let lending, making it that little bit easier to get to the sort of the figures you could achieve pre Budget. It’s not there yet, but it is going in the right direction. This will, no doubt, bring huge relief to those whose fixed rate mortgages are coming up for renegotiation.

From our perspective, we expect to see this trend continue as competition between lenders intensifies and they find themselves having to offer increasingly attractive rates in order to win customers. What’s more, there are signs that inflation is starting to tail off, so this too could boost market confidence. It’s an interesting time and – we seem to be saying this a lot right now – it could actually be worth taking another look at your mortgage to see if you can find a better deal.