Interest rates could be at 0.5% till 2013

A report by a chief economist from Standard Chartered bank (which basically means the report will be wrong, sorry couldn’t resist) forecast that interest rates could stay at 0.5% until 2013.

On the face of it that is great news for the property investor sitting on existing tracker rates – and it’s also better news for those of you looking to remortgage.

Lenders have been slow to reduce buy to let rates over the last few months and the margin between swap rates and fixed rates are almost at a record high. So it seems unlikely that lenders will reduce the rates on their new buy to let mortgage products much more. So for those of you looking to remortgage, for example to release further capital to invest or to pay off a lender that offers you a discount, then there is no time like the present.

Buy to let lending to increase

One of our main buy to let lenders has informally told us that they were going to increase their lending target by 50% next month. Don’t get too excited though as the credit scoring system isn’t going to change!

London Calling

Is it me or is the London property market getting excitable again? Bizarrely we had one client last week that had agreed with a new build developer a month ago a purchase price of £250,000 only to be told last week that he had measured the apartment wrong and therefore the purchase price was increasing to £290,000.
It doesn’t take long does it!