Alarm over the latest inflation figures, released three weeks ago, has meant rates for fixed-rate mortgages have been increased quickly, and significantly.
It has been argued that homeowners have seen even higher rates before, in the 80s. In the year 1980, the official Bank of England interest rate was 14.2 per cent . Some believe that the experience of homeowners back then was therefore far worse. All this – combined with a weaker economic outlook and a recession still entirely possible – is causing people to stop getting mortgages, or get smaller ones.and home movers fell to its lowest level since spring 2020 in the first three months of the year, a time when the housing market was largely closed during the first Covid-19 lockdown.
Thousands more homeowners are expected to suffer from rising rates with 367,000 fixed-rate mortgages scheduled to reach the end of their five-year deals over the next year, according to data from Equifax, with the majority of these seeing an increase to their bills of £300 a month.