LMS has published its latest round of remortgage analysis, revealing January trends and market activity, predicting that “collaboration and innovation will be key to progressing high levels of demand in 2022”.
Although the LMS monthly remortgage snapshot for January reveals a slowing of instructions compared to December, year-on-year figures show a 60% increase.
For those that remortgaged in January, the average monthly payment decrease was £231 and 64% of those who remortgaged took out a 5-year fixed rate product, the most popular product in January. Figures also show that 29% of remortgagers’ primary aim when remortgaging was to lower their monthly payments, and 43% of those borrowing in January increased their loan sizes with an average increase of £22,245.
Nick Chadbourne, CEO, LMS, commented:
“Although remortgage instructions are down month on month, this just because December saw a barrage of activity due to an ERC date. There is always a slowish start to January too, but year on year we are around 60% up and the end of the month had a particularly high run rate.
We are seeing the same on transactional activity. February activity was high and the softening we expected is not materialising. It looks like people are still looking to move house while rates are low and, if we had the stock of houses available, the market could still be running like last year.
In short, both sides of the industry will be incredibly busy for the foreseeable. The next major ERC date is the 1st April so all remortgage eyes will be on that, while the pipelines in transactional teams also remain swollen creating capacity challenges for any all conveyancers. Q2 will soften for remortgages after the big April 1st spike, but this will be short lived as H2 has more product expiries than any six-month period in the past 10 years.”
