If you want a snapshot of just how scattered the buy-to-let mortgage market is right now, look at what happened in the space of a single week. TSB increased it’s fixed rates up by as much as 0.20 percentage points. At the same time, Landbay cut rates on several of its tracker deals by up to 0.15 points and launched eleven new tracker products. And Rely launched an entirely new fixed range with rates starting lower than before. Three lenders, three different directions in rates, all in the space of a few days.
Let’s look at them one at a time, because the specifics tell you more than the headline does.
TSB’s increase pushed its five-year fix at 80% loan-to-value up to 5.69%, fixed until January 2032, with a £1,995 product fee and a free valuation. It’s still rated an “outstanding” product by the comparison sites, for what that’s worth, but it’s still an increase and not a cut, and it happened the same week as two lenders cut their rates.
Landbay’s lower rates are aimed at investors who’d rather not lock into a long fix while the picture’s this mixed. Its Core two-year tracker now starts at the Bank of England base rate plus 0.29% with a 65% loan-to-value, and with no early repayment charges. Its Premier Like-for-Like range has a new two-year tracker at 75% LTV starting at base rate plus 0.34%, also without early repayment charges, and a stress rate of 4.5% or the pay rate for anyone refinancing without extra borrowing. The cuts and new launches covered its Core, Premier, Small HMO and Product Transfer ranges, so this wasn’t just about winning new purchase business – existing Landbay borrowers coming up to remortgage now have cheaper options this week too.
Rely’s new range runs from one-year fixes at 2.85% up to five-year fixes from 4.55%, with several fee options at each term, including a new 7% fee option on the five-year deals. More fee options means more ways to shape the deal around what you actually need, whether that’s the lowest possible pay rate or the lowest possible upfront cost. It’s also a new lender name to remember if you haven’t come across it before – a reminder that the panel of lenders worth checking keeps growing, not just the big familiar names.
Here’s the thing I’d actually take from all this. It would be easy to read the TSB headline and assume rates are climbing everywhere, or read about Landbay and Rely and assume they’re falling everywhere. Neither is true. Three lenders moved in different directions in the same week, for their own commercial reasons that have nothing to do with each other, and that’s likely to keep happening as lenders reprice around their own funding costs and appetite for risk rather than all following the same signal.
If you’ve got a remortgage coming up, or you’re weighing up a purchase, the only way to know what’s actually available to you is to have someone check the live, current products across the whole panel of lenders, not just the two or three names you already know.
If you’re the sort of investor who’d normally just take whatever renewal offer your existing lender sends through, now’s the time to actually open it and check the figure against what else is out there, rather than assume it’s still the best deal available. A lender that put its rates up in July might have quietly cut them again by September, and the other way round too – the only way to know which applies to you is to look, not to remember.
That’s exactly the kind of legwork a good mortgage broker does as a matter of course, and it’s worth asking for their help, especially in a market moving in this many directions at once.
By the way, if you don’t have a mortgage broker, or you’d like a second opinion, I’ll be very happy to put you in touch with my very good mortgage broker.
Just email me: thepropertyteacher@gmail.com and I’ll happily make the introduction.
Here’s to successful property investing.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor & ex-Chartered Surveyor
P.S. If you’d like a deeper dive into property investing based on the real-life experience of an investor who has built a substantial multi-property portfolio, my popular e-book, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, explains how I built my own portfolio from scratch and the principles that can help you do the same.
You can find out more here: https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-investors-strategy-workshop/
