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.
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has been suggested that Northern Rock is only able to have overpaid on what it owes to date because it has effectively withdrawn from the mortgage market and has received significant sums of money by calling in the home loans.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 latest offer in the mortgage market comes from Lloyds TSB which has introduced a new Airmiles mortgage.
The Lloyds TSB mortgage is not as novel as it sounds, the Airmiles being provided for taking out the mortgage, customers are not able to pay it off using them. The three tear fixed rate offer gives customers 50 Airmiles when signing up plus a further 6,000 when it is completed. The interest rate on the mortgage begins at 5.89 percent depending on applicant circumstances.
As a spokeswoman from Lloyds TSB said, this new mortgage combines a good rate of interest, a decent length fixed term and also a practical and useful reward that customers can use.
