Mortgages Uncovered

It’s all over the news today that First Direct has officially withdrawn its mortgages for any new customers.  The bank says it has taken this move because, as many other lenders are saying, they have been inundated with requests for new mortgages and this is a defensive move in the current climate.  It will also enable them to catch up on the backlog. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royal Bank of Scotland has now increased the minimum amount of deposit it will accept on Buy to Let mortgages as well from 15% to 25%. These levels are reverting back to how they used to be about a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »

First Direct announced plans this week to hike its interest rates. They withdrew their 4.75% tracker two year deal and replaced it with a 4.95% mortgage instead.

Their mortgages have been in demand so much Read the rest of this entry »

One of the UK’s biggest mortgage lenders, the Nationwide, has announced its intention to increase its mortgage rates to help cope with the UK credit crunch.

Some of its mortgages, including fixed and tracker rate deals, will increase by around 0.6%. That’s a big hike for many mortgages.

That will put some of its interest rates at up to 7%. Some believe that the Nationwide is effectively pricing itself out Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from our earlier article about Scottish Widows withdrawing several of their mortgages, two more lenders have now followed suit.

Bath Building Society and Earl Shilton Building Society have withdrawn ALL their mortgages except for the Standard Variable Rate, which regular readers of this site will know we do not recommend anyone be on that!

Bath BS says it has simply run out of lending money! Read the rest of this entry »

In our earlier article, we talked about how Northern Rock had deliberately increased its rates so they were uncompetitive and deliberately would not attract new business.

Now, they have made a determined move away from the sub-prime, low income mortgage market completely Read the rest of this entry »

Mortgage company WAVE is introducing a range of new products and is increasing the minimum age on all its products to 21 years old. It is also going to stop allowing first-time buyers to use its Buy-To-Let mortgages. Is this a sign of things to come, could others follow suit and increase the minimum age on their mortgage products to 21 years old as well?

At Mortgages Uncovered, we doubt that, mainly because Read the rest of this entry »

Nationwide, one of the UK’s remaining building societies, has said this week that it’s first time buyers mortgages are still one of the best deals around. This is despite having reduced their maximum Loan-To-Value on fixed and tracker mortgages from their original 90 to a whopping 75 per cent!

Of course, you can still have a higher Loan-To-Value if you like, you’ll just have to Read the rest of this entry »