I’m sure everyone has been glued to the budget over the last two days (yawn), so I’ll keep my comments brief about how it affects the mortgage market. For me, the best quote so far is “Mr Darling has used a water pistol to try to put out a fire.”

So what did the budget do for the housing market? Well:

• It extended the stamp duty holiday until end of next year.
• The government will continue its Mortgage Interest Scheme for another six months for those who have lost their job, as long as they are looking for work.
• To quote the man himself: “…the introduction, following state aid approval, of the scheme to guarantee securities backed by mortgages – which will help to ease the flow of mortgage finance." A. Darling
• Total new borrowing is forecast to reach £700bn by 2013 – and you thought Mortgage Express were reckless lenders!

So is any of this making any difference to the current buy to let mortgage market? In a word – No.

The market is ticking along with no nasty surprises but also no real changes either which is actually a good thing. Stability is not something we’ve had much of recently so as long as people know they can get finance, then the current environment means many people are getting property bargains.

Green Shoots

Here’s two:

1.       Mortgage lending up 16 per cent in March.

2.       Barclays has revealed today that it plans to increase its mortgage lending by £5.5bn in 2009, as part of its plans to lend an additional £11bn to UK households and businesses.

Tip of the week - Regional building societies

There are a number of regional building societies which offer some pretty good rates and even better fees (Ipswich BS springs to mind), but only allows applications from properties within certain postcodes. And there are quite a few more – we will always review these with you when you call, so bear in mind that the usual suspects (BM, C&G, Godiva etc) are not always the cheapest! Ring for more details.