Springtide: Mortgage lending to soar in H2

Henry Knight, Springtide managing director, was keen to dispel pessimism surrounding the market.

He said: “As we predicted before the implementation of MMR, the bottleneck created by the new rules saw a slowdown in lender processing time which in turn negatively impacted last quarter’s gross mortgage approval figures.

“However, behind the scenes, the actual number of mortgage deals being done has remained consistently strong, on both a micro and macro level.

“Moving forward into second half of the year, we see a very positive picture for the mortgage market.”

Revised projections from the Council of Mortgage Lenders showed an 18% increase in 2014 lending to £208bn.

Knight added: “Although the new lending restrictions coming in will curb borrowing for certain individuals, they will not inhibit mortgage lending as a whole. Come September, once the seasonal lull of summer holidays is over, we believe the final push towards the year end will commence in full.

“We are also aware that many lenders have reported lower figures at end of Q2 than they had initially predicted and that this in turn could see some increasingly competitive pricing for the remainder of the year as a result of lenders wanting to catch up and fulfil their production targets.”