It’s been an eventful couple of months, but with the dust of the experiment in the Government’s growth at all cost policy now mercifully becoming a distant memory; a new Prime Minister installed; and cabinet appointed, lenders including ourselves have been focussed on getting back into the market.
In summary, what I have always felt was important in relaunching products is that we provide a comprehensive suite for all borrowers and our intermediary partners.
With rates changing as often as they have, it is important to make sure there is choice for borrowers that actually helps them achieve their home-moving dreams or even makes life that little bit less worrying when securing or renewing their home finance.
Our latest products reflect the new world of higher interest rates in which we now live, but we all know people do not stop moving because of interest rates.
People change jobs, have bigger families, choose to downsize or retire. We are therefore providing products that offer flexibility and choice to suit as many borrowers as possible.
In the past couple of weeks, we have reintroduced new purchase and remortgage products for residential borrowers up to 95% LTV, across a range of fixed-rate terms.
However, we recognise support has to go further and have therefore launched our Shared Ownership proposition with a range of products that support home buyers.
These are available up to a maximum LTV of 95% of the borrower’s share and are available to those with a maximum household income of up to £80,000 (£90,000 in London).
These flexible options also offer buyers the ability to purchase between 25% and 75% share of the property.
Where interest rates do spark activity is in the remortgage market and so we have addressed that too – specifically with an option on the higher LTV products that include two and five-year fixed products up to 80% LTV.
We recognise that we need to offer solutions for a number of customers’ needs and have re-introduced our large loan product range, which is available up to 65% loan-to-value (LTV).
The 2-year product is available for loans between £1.5m and £2m and comes with competitive early repayment charges (ERC).
In order to make sure we can help further we have also introduced the range of large loan products, with enhanced income multiples of up to five and a half times income to give borrowers as much flexibility as we reasonably can.
Of course, all these products are accompanied as ever with our pragmatic approach to underwriting.
Manual underwriting and good service are probably as important as any other element of the mortgage process in terms of helping our brokers get their clients’ applications across the line and we are ready to talk to you about how we can help.
We’re committed to helping people across the country achieve their dreams of home ownership by providing as many options to buyers as possible.
Franco Di Pietro is head of intermediary mortgages at Newcastle Building Society
