Searches for mortgages suitable for first-time buyers (FTBs) shot up by 10% in May on a monthly basis, shows newly released data from Twenty7Tec.
This means that FTB searches stood at 19.4% of mortgage searches in May.
However, the firm also says that by the end of that month, 5% of all mortgage products had been taken off the market within the six weeks prior, and it was the first month since November 2021 with fewer than 1,000 95% LTV mortgages to choose from.
It was the second month in a row that overall product numbers fell. Twenty7Tec says the choice of products is now 87.5% of pre-pandemic highs – 17,647 in total on its system.
Specialist borrowing appears to be on the rise: May was home to four of the ten busiest days ever for self-employed mortgage searches and there was a 34.6% increase in the volume of searches for mortgages for properties valued at £1m and over.
Twenty7Tec director of lender relationships Nathan Reilly comments: “This year to date, we’ve seen a large uplift in the average number of mortgage searches being run by each adviser compared to the same period last year which also included the stamp duty deadline.
“June 2022 is going to be an incredibly interesting month for product availability after two consecutive months of product volumes dropping. That statistic is often a bellwether for mortgage market confidence.”