As the stamp duty holiday begins to taper towards its end, the latest Moneyfacts UK Mortgage Trends Treasury Report data, to be published later this week, reveals both continuing growth in the level of product choice for borrowers, but also rate competition leading to reductions in the overall average fixed rates month-on-month as providers continue to work to entice borrowers.
- Nine months of consecutive increases in mortgage availability sees total product choice reach its greatest level in 16-months with 4,512 deals on offer, an increase of 269 in the last month alone and the highest this has been since March 2020 (5,222).
- This is the first time since June of 2018 that we have recorded availability increasing across all the individual loan-to-value (LTV) tiers. Borrowers seeking higher LTV products have seen the largest improvements in choice, particularly at 95% LTV, where we recorded a jump of 61 products compared to June 2021, and the current total of 253 available deals offers 239 products more than there were this time last year.
- For only the second time in the past 12 months, both the average overall two-year and five-year fixed rates fell over the course of the month to 2.55% and 2.78% respectively. Reducing by 0.04% in both cases, these are the largest monthly reductions recorded for either rate since June 2020, perhaps reflecting some of the competition we are seeing in the market of late. They are however some considerable way above their equivalent rates year-on-year, as July 2020 we logged record lows of 1.99% and 2.25% for these rates, due to the dearth of available deals fuelling these averages, particularly at the higher-rated, higher-risk top LTV brackets.