There have been a couple of changes this week that have started us thinking that there is a bit of a mood change in the buy to let world.

Even though swap rates have slowly reduced in the last month, today I am going to give you a couple of examples of lenders slightly tightening their criteria. Where interest rates are heading is a moot point but the pricing of buy to let mortgage deals at the moment certainly seem to have lost any connection they may have had with bank of England base rate. There is a very wide gap between buy to let mortgage rates and residential rates and they seem to be heading further apart. Add into the mix the dearth of buy to let mortgage lenders and buy to let mortgages look like they are heading slowly back upwards.

So is this bad news? Well, to get it into perspective even though base rate remains at 0.5%, the buy to let mortgages on offer are still very low compared to a year ago (in fact I checked our newswire from the 14 May 2008 and the best 75% mortgage was 6.19%) however the fact is that with less lenders about as soon as interest rates have a hint they will be rising then buy to let mortgage rates will rise too.