Source: The Guardian —
Five-year fixed-rate mortgages priced at below 4% are back on sale for the first time since just after the disastrous autumn mini-budget.
HSBC has repriced its range and introduced a new five-year fix at 3.99% for customers remortgaging who are looking to borrow up to 60% of the property’s value. It means people are able to fix their monthly home loan costs at a level below the Bank of England base rate, which rose to 4% last Thursday.
Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget on 23 September last year unleashed chaos in the financial markets, and helped push the price of many new fixed home loan deals above 6%.
However, over the past couple of months lenders have been gradually reducing the cost of their new fixes, and some mortgage brokers have gone as far as to claim there is a “price war” between lenders, with lower rates appearing daily.
In testimony to MPs on Tuesday, HSBC chief executive, Ian Stuart, contrasted the current sub-4% rates with the situation in December, when 60,000 HSBC borrowers were facing levels of 7%. “If you heard the strain in our customers, the anxiety in our customers was palpable,” he told the Treasury select committee.
Late last week, Virgin Money launched a 10-year fixed-rate mortgage priced at 3.99%, though many people are not keen to sign up to a deal of that length.
