{"id":254,"date":"2016-02-29T10:46:19","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T10:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.buyassociation.co.uk\/?p=254"},"modified":"2016-02-29T10:46:19","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T10:46:19","slug":"more-mortgages-approved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/2016\/02\/29\/more-mortgages-approved\/","title":{"rendered":"More mortgages approved"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Mortgage approvals in the UK reached a two-year high in January as savvy buy-to-let investors rushed to beat the stamp duty tax increase.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>According to the Bank of England, lenders agreed to advance 74,581 mortgages, breaking a two year old record from January 2014. To put this in context, in December 71,335 loans were agreed. <\/p>\n<p>The original forecast by economists expected 74,000 mortgages agreed. Net mortgage lending climbed to a total of \u00a33.7bn (US$ 5.1bn). <\/p>\n<p><strong>These latest figures strengthen forecasts that investors in rental property are buying up property before April, when a new legislation will come into place in form of a stamp duty surcharge on buy-to-let investments and second homes.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>Low interest rates and record employment levels are keeping demand for houses too high to be matched by supply.The effective interest rate on new secured loans dropped 6 basis points to 2.49% in January. The rate on outstanding mortgages went down 3 basis points to 2.96%. Loans approved for remortgaging increased to 42,228.<\/p>\n<p>Net lending to consumers went up to \u00a31.6bn, with loans on credit cards reaching the highest since May 2008. Consumer credit rose by 9.1% from a year before, the fastest pace in 10 years. <\/p>\n<p>Business lending to non-financial firms rose by an all-time high of \u00a36.3bn, of which smaller companies accounted for only \u00a3500m. <\/p>\n<p>M4 is a broad measure of money supply and stayed unchanged month-on-month, whilst rising 0.8% from the year earlier. An underlying measure of M4 went up 4.3% on a 3-month annualised basis. <\/p>\n<p>The BOE also stated that overseas investors sold a net \u00a36.3bn of gilts in January, a drastic increase from net sales of \u00a31.7bn in December. These figures represent the biggest net disposal since March 2014 and may be seen as a reflection of concerns regarding a \u201cBrexit\u201d, a British exit from the European Union.<\/p>\n<p>Source: Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mortgage approvals in the UK reached a two-year high in January as savvy buy-to-let investors rushed to beat the stamp duty tax increase. According to the Bank of England, lenders agreed to advance 74,581 mortgages, breaking a two year old record from January 2014. To put this in context, in December 71,335 loans were agreed.<a class=\"excerpt-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/2016\/02\/29\/more-mortgages-approved\/\" title=\"ReadMore mortgages approved\">&#8230; Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":4802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,59],"tags":[22,64,51,25,37],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}