Posts Tagged ‘mortgage market’

High time APR or Annual Percentage Rate interest calculations were removed from mortgage products

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

One of the most bewildering and confusing items on any mortgage illustration from my point of view must be the Annual Percentage Rate or APR listed on a product. APR was developed to give a comparative measure between various loans to show the overall cost of the borrowing on an annual basis taking into account a much broader range of fees and charges than the loan interest on its own.

Now that’s a good thing where the calculation makes sense, but on mortgage products in its current guise it makes no sense at all.

A simple look at the best buy tables on our website will show you that a product far cheaper during its initial interest rate term may have a much higher APR than a product with a considerably higher rate of interest. The issue is that APR is calculated over the lifetime of the loan and so will also consider the reversion rate of the product after its initial term.

There are several reasons why this is misleading;

  1. 1. Reversion rates are generally variable and not linked directly to bank base rate. In two years time a lender with a previously un-competitive reversion rate may well be leading the market and vice versa – hence it is not a factor that should play a major part in the decision making process.
  2. 2. You would generally regularly remortgage during the early years of your mortgage repayment to ensure a competitive rate of interest so including the reversion rate after the initial mortgage term distorts the picture.
  3. 3. Clever design can skew the figure. Lifetime trackers appear very competitive because they have no reversion rate, and refunding upfront fee’s affects the calculation but could cost a pretty penny if the loan never goes ahead.

APR is a system that was never really designed for mortgage contracts but has become a legal obligation when advertising them due to the confused dual regulatory system between the FSA and the Office of Fair Trading, it makes some sense on unsecured loans and very little in the mortgage market.

It is high time this dual regulation was removed and APR calculations either scrapped on mortgage contracts or replaced with something far more specific to the complex nature a mortgage product.

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Why the rate loading Mr Lender?

Monday, October 26th, 2009

When a mortgage broker arranges a mortgage for a borrower the commission they receive (if they take the commission as opposed to a fee) is not standardised but there is however only a limited difference from lender to lender. Typically the percentage is about 0.3 to 0.35% for a residential mortgage with good credit, 0.40 to 0.45% for buy to let mortgages, and slightly higher for adverse credit applications.

Why then are several banks, one of which I won’t name but is almost entirely government owned (guess who?) is loading rates available via intermediaries by anything up to 1% against an equivalent product available through them direct? If these lenders are proposing that it costs them more to accept intermediary applications this is farcical.

They may argue that the intermediary market would simply direct too much business to them which they don’t have funds to supply. This is plausible but I think it is actually pricing intermediary products out of the market to attract business from consumers direct who can then be goat herded into higher rate products with down valuations and clandestine credit scoring, or even lower rate products with ridiculous fee’s which are more expensive in reality. Without a broker to argue the case and guide on fee’s most people will simply accept being cascaded to a higher rate without asking difficult questions, or being declined an application having paid for valuations and the like.

I want someone to actually put the question to these banks, how is this rate loading fair practice and why is it in place? Because to the educated it seems to be the intention to get mortgage advisors out of the market so that dodgy products can once again be sold in bulk. Just look at the return of long early repayment charges on market leading rates as a sign that lenders are looking for ways to lock customers into potentially crippling mortgage rates.

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