Fixing for Longer Term Mortgages and why the Financial Crash and Covidiacy Helped Landlords

I am staggered to keep reading about people who, two to three years ago, opted for two or three years fixed term mortgages instead of longer terms of at least five years. More on that in a moment, but first I look at why the financial crash and the events of 2020-2022 helped property buyers and landlords. Why The Financial […]

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Buy to Let Mortgage Criteria Getting Smarter, Slowly

David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com welcomes some more sensible lending from a few high street banks and building societies in the buy to let mortgage space. About time too. Buy to Let Mortgage Criteria Getting Smarter, Slowly From time to time I have commented on the “Computer Says No” attitude of the big high street banks and nearly all the building societies when it comes to […]

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Applying on a Buy to Let Mortgage for a House you Intend to Live In

David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com explains why more borrowers will try to “game” mortgage lenders by applying on buy to let mortgages for loans on properties that they intend to live in themselves. One of the likely outcomes of the Mortgage Market Review (MMR), which now applies to all residential loans, is that getting a mortgage for residential mortgages might prove […]

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Our New Newsletter Is Out in January… and a Word About Ethics in the Business of Being a Landlord

We are now closing for the Christmas and New Year break. However, our still free, new quarterly newsletter will go out in the first or second week of January, so look out for this and remember to put our email address, [email protected] in your whitelist to ensure you receive it. If you don’t already get the newsletter but would like […]

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Mortgage Tracker Rates Open Letter to Andrew Tyrie MP

In this letter to Andrew Tyrie MP I ask him to take action to stop mortgage lenders cheating their buy to let Bank of England (BOE) mortgage tracker rate customers by invoking small print terms in separate documents that were never meant to apply to BOE tracker loans. I have highlighted this by illustrating from my own personal experience with […]

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West Bromwich Building Society Mortgage Rate Hike

David Lawrenson, private rented sector expert and director of LettingFocus.com, highlights the risks to lenders of invoking terms in the small print of mortgage contracts to hike landlords’ tracker mortgage rates. At previous blog posts we predicted that it was likely that other lenders would follow the Bank of Ireland’s move in hiking interest rates on buy to let mortgage […]

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Why New Build Buy to Let Loans Went Wrong for the UK’s Mortgage Lenders

In this article, private rented sector consultant David Lawrenson of LettingFocus goes down memory lane to look at how and why lenders made a mess of buy to let loans for new build stock. Newbies in residential property investment may wonder why there is a lack of lender appetite to lend on new build flats. Some lenders will not lend […]

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London Assembly Calls for Longer Term Tenancies

At LettingFocus we are pleased to see our evidence to the London Assembly on the private rented sector was accepted and made it through as a key recommendation. The London Assembly has issued another report on the private rented sector – this time calling for the mayor to intervene in the capital’s private rented sector to “stabilise rents” and encourage […]

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When is a Tracker Mortgage Not Really a Tracker Mortgage and How More Lenders Are Giving Themselves Get-Out Clauses

David Lawrenson of private rent consultants, LettingFocus.com explains how mortgage lenders have now set up get out clauses within their tracker mortgage deals which are so wide that the industry could eventually be forced to stop marketing them as tracker deals. He also predicts that the Bank of Ireland “rate hike” case will result in a victory for those landlords […]

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