The Abbey National announced rate cuts on some of its mortgage products at the weekend as well as bringing out two new fixed rate mortgage offers.
Some of the Abbey National two year tracker mortgages have seen rate reductions of up to 0.2 percent, with the lowest introductory rate now standing at 6.04 percent. One of the new mortgages offered by the Abbey is a 10 year fixed rate mortgage, with a lowest rate available of 6.25 percent.
An Abbey National spokesman explained that it was the strength the big high street name had in the mortgage market that made these rate cuts possible. The bank also feels that the 10 year fixed rate mortgage is going to prove very popular, combining as it does an attractive interest rate and a long fixed term period.
According the the Alliance and Leicester mortgage department there are around 3.25 million homeowners who would like to move house in the coming year.
This appears also to drive the move to home improvements, although that is also being pushed on by those who feel that they will be unable to move and so are improving their homes to make them better suited to their current requirements. The Alliance and Leicester found that around 20 percent of homeowners are making home improvements in order to make their property more attractive to buyers whilst half of them are doing it to avoid the issues associated with selling.
One the key areas people want to improve, said the Alliance and Leicester, is the number of bedrooms, always a key issue, especially with families. This is one of the biggest reasons for moving, especially as it can be very costly or totally impractical to add a bedroom to many properties.
Customers taking an Alliance and Leicester mortgage through a broker are going to find the process is much faster than it used to be thanks to the introduction of ifax.
This new system transforms faxes sent by brokers into emails that are therefore much easier to read and go straight to the relevant persons inbox rather than hanging around the office. An Alliance and Leicester spokeswoman supported the move and confirmed that the new ifax system would greatly increase processing speed and reduce errors.
The system can work for pretty much all the relevant documents so at each step of the way Alliance and Leicester mortgage customers will see a speedy turnround on their paperwork. The system will also be of great benefit to the intermediaries too of course.
