Santander has become the latest bank to pull its entire range of mortgage deals for new customers, as rising interest rates continue to wreak havoc on the housing market.
The high street lender was forced to suspend rates on new residential and buy-to-let offers today after it was flooded with applications from borrowers desperate to refinance.
It comes after HSBC last week took emergency measures to withdraw its mortgage deals for new customers, relaunching them 0.45 percentage points higher. Until yesterday, Santander was the only major lender not to have repriced its mortgage range. It has now said no new deals will be available until Wednesday.
Dominik Lipnicki, a broker at Your Mortgage Decisions, warned: ‘We’re not even at the beginning of the end yet. Lenders don’t want to be overwhelmed, so when one withdraws others follow suit. I don’t think this is the last withdrawal of products we will see this week.’
Santander has become the latest bank to pull its entire range of mortgage deals for new customers, as rising interest rates continue to wreak havoc on the housing market (File image)
Hundreds of home loans have been pulled by banks and building societies in recent weeks (File image)
Lenders have been in a race to hike rates since May 24, when official figures revealed inflation is still higher than had been forecast, at 8.7 per cent.
Hundreds of home loans have been pulled by banks and building societies in recent weeks. From today, NatWest has hiked rates on its residential two and five-year deals by 0.2 percentage points and First Direct increased its fixed-rate deals by up to 0.49 per cent today.
Rob Gill, of Altura Mortgage Finance, said: ‘What started with smaller lenders dramatically pulling out of the market has now spread to much larger lenders, with Nationwide, HSBC and most recently Santander.
Lenders are still working to manage volumes and recover from some very challenging market conditions.’
