Mortgages Uncovered

The UK retail arm of Spain’s Santander, Abbey National is benefitting from the current climate and the discomfort of its peers as it gained market share in mortgages and has been continuing to win new customer deposits.

Their profits they say are “significantly ahead. Abbey National’s seeming continued success is monitored without the figures from Alliance & Leicester, the UK mortgage lender, who Santander just recently acquired, nor any of the deposit taking recent activities of Santander’s recent take over, Bradford & Bingley.

Abbey claimed that net lending for mortgages during the third quarter was £2.5 billion which took the total for the 9 months to end from the beginning of the year to £10.8bn, which was up from £6.7bn against the same timeframe in 2007 which was the final period of time before the crises hit.

Abbey have clearly benefited from maintaining higher margins in their mortgage business and claimed that arrears rates were well below the industry average. The amount of properties in their mortgage portfolio had risen to 802 by end of September 08, from 589 at the end of the last quarter.

Abbey will not be raising capital through the UK government’s scheme, because Santander has already injected another extra £1 billion of capital into all its UK businesses following the acquisition of Alliance and Leicester and Bradford and Bingley. These two additional acquisitions have given Santander 1,300 branches throughout the UK, which equates to the third largest mortgage deposit taker in the country.