The reopening of the property market has had an immediate positive impact on mortgage activity according to recent data.
Whilst Twenty7Tec’s mortgage statistics for the week ending May 13 suggested that both search and document volume was falling on a weekly and fortnightly comparison, the figures for Tuesday, the day it was announced that the market was released, were showing considerable increases.
For Tuesday May 13 alone, the volume of searches was up on a weekly, fortnightly and four week basis with rises of 7.98%, 12.54% and 17.31% respectively.
However, when the same figures were taking the entire week into account, search volume was declining by 7.57% on the previous week and 0.34% on the figures for the start of May.
On a daily comparison, the volume of documents for May 13 had increased by 2.52% on the previous week, 1.53% on the figures from two weeks ago and 3.77% on those from a month ago.
James Tucker, CEO of mortgage technology provider Twenty7Tec says:
“What a difference a day makes. Yesterday’s announcement by the Government that estate agents can begin to conduct business again and physical valuations can be conducted was clearly the signal that the market was waiting for.
“Pretty much across the board, the lights turned green on our dashboard – signalling higher volumes of searches, documents produced and higher values too. Purchase mortgages had a very strong day yesterday and were up 7.76% on the prior day alone.
“Seven-day volumes are still well down on the market highs of February and March, but we have rebounded a long way over the past few weeks with searches for purchase mortgages now almost double the figures of four weeks ago.
“Remortgages have edged down slightly after sustaining a good run during lockdown. We’ll monitor closely how the new market conditions will affect this tranche of the mortgage industry closely over coming days.
“In the Government’s documents yesterday, there were a lot of rules and ways of working for the industry to digest and normalise. But given the speed with which we have adapted to mortgage holidays and desktop valuations, we don’t believe that the Government’s requests will hold the industry back.
“Over coming days, it’ll be interesting to see how consumer confidence returns to the market over the medium term alongside the obvious pent up demand of maybe half a million house moves that had been put on hold.”
