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.
New mortgage customers at the Halifax will have to pay a little more for their home loans from today if they are taking out a tracker or fixed rate mortgage product.
The Halifax tracker mortgage rate goes up to 6.29 percent from 5.99, which is 1.29 percent above the base rate set by the Bank of England. Meanwhile the three year fixed rate mortgage offer rises to 6.44 percent, up from 6.22. A Halifax spokesman clarified that the increases will apply to just 5 of the 32 different tracker mortgages they offer and 19 of the 31 different fixed rate mortgages provided.
In that context then there are still many opportunities to avoid paying the extra interest, though of course the Halifax mortgage products that have been selected are the ones that will be the most popular.
After being unable to maintain the repayments on her GBP360,000 Northern Rock mortgage Christina Georgiou and her three children have been given just a month to vacate the property they once called home.
There are anticipated to be many thousands of people just like Ms Georgiou who have fallen behind on their mortgage repayments but the irony of Northern rock, effectively a government backed financial institution, throwing people out of their home is sure to stir up controversy.
A particularly relevant fact of this situation is that the Northern Rock lent the money not really knowing if the repayments were affordable. This is much like many other banks and building societies which will strike a sombre note for many observers who may now be expecting this scenario repeated across the country.
