Good news for those looking to buy property comes in the shape of some Nationwide Building Society mortgage rates being reduced.
Home loan borrowers will enjoy reduced rates on both tracker mortgages and those on the variable base rate, helping get a foot on the housing ladder. A Nationwide Building Society spokesman explained that this is a passing on of the full base rate cut provided by the Bank of England. As a society they always aim to do the best for their members.
The reduced rates are not being carried through to Nationwide Building Society fixed rate mortgages though, since they are operating in slightly different conditions. For these types of mortgage the rate is actually going up, though the benefit of having the rate fixed for a period of time is certainly worth paying a little extra for.
The fact that Northern Rock is making repayments back to the Bank of England for the bail out loan it received seems, on the face of it, to be good news, though it could prove to be detrimental to the mortgage market as a whole.
It has been suggested that Northern Rock is only able to have overpaid on what it owes to date because it has effectively withdrawn from the mortgage market and has received significant sums of money by calling in the home loans. In the very short term it allows Northern Rock to get ahead on their payments, but in the future this means there is less money available in the mortgage market.
If there is less money available to borrow for mortgage customers then the cost of borrowing can rise further, fuelled by demand outstripping supply. Northern Rock mortgages may well come back into the market in the future but at the moment these are worrying times.
The Abbey National has today announced mortgage rate cuts on several of its home loan products, specifically the fixed rate and flexible mortgages.
All of the Abbey National flexible offset mortgages have had a rate cut of 0.2 percent, as have the five year fixed rate offers, while three year tracker mortgages have received a reduction of 0.1 percent. They have also stated that more reductions will follow, these being on the two year and three year fixed rate mortgages, where rates could come down by a quarter of 1 percent.
A spokesman for the Abbey National stated that they wanted to do the best they could for the customer, delivering the best possible deal whenever possible. It is also hoped that the cutting of rates across the market will stimulate activity in the housing market.
