Inside the mortgage trade exhibition!

Over 70 exhibitors, including AToM, were in attendance at last week’s Mortgage trade event of the year – Mortgage Business EXPO 2011. More than 2,500 Mortgage Brokers, Independent Financial Advisers and Estate Agents visited over the two days to explore the products and offerings of the many Banks, Building Societies, Solicitors, Bridging and Commercial Funders and Specialist Mortgage Packagers. In addition, our trade association (Association of Mortgage Intermediaries) held numerous seminars covering various issues including ‘Mortgage Market updates: the impact of the impending European Mortgage directive’: ‘Consumer Protection’: ‘Current Issues’ and ‘Economic impact of the Economy’. How exciting it all sounds!

However, the reality is that we currently appear to be in a buoyant mortgage market and all of the Lenders at EXPO wanted to lend! This included some of the usual household names (not all could make it!), but more so the smaller lenders with no obvious funding issues, including Building Societies! Especially prominent were those in the Commercial and Short Term Lending (Bridging Finance) arenas.

All in all, we had a good two days exhibiting, made some fantastic new contacts and achieved a real insight as to how the market is currently holding up in various areas of the country. Believe me, the south is doing pretty well…

What I found valuable was the firm response to a question posed during a Lenders seminar with a panel consisting of Nationwide, Barclays, Northern Rock (Virgin Money), Platform (Co-Op) and GE Money Home Lending. The question raised to them all was, simply put, when do you hink the Bank of England will increase the base rate? The responses were pretty similar from all
parties – between late 2013 and early 2014.

Take what you want from this, but all of a sudden, short to medium term tracker rates look more attractive than they did just a few minutes ago!