A mixed bag of reports in the personal finance pages over the last couple of days show that while mortgage lenders are at last passing on rate cuts to many home buyers, those using fixed rate mortgages are actually seeing an increase in their repayments.
Although interest rate charges are still much higher than the Bank of England base rate of 0.5%, hovering around the 4% mark, there are many reports that the UK housing market is picking up and mortgages are becoming easier to come by. There are also various reports from Estate Agents suggesting that the housing market has already bottomed out and that home sales are increasing.
On the other hand, the Council of Mortgage Lenders says that home re-possesions in the UK stood at almost 13,000 for the first three months of this year, an increase of 50% from the same period last year. The number of loans with arrears of more than 2.5 percent of the mortgage balance rose by 62 percent on the year to 205,300 in the first quarter, the CML said. That was a rise of 12 percent compared with the last three months of 2008.
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