The financial sector has been struggling terribly over the last two years with mortgage, remortgage and loan lending ,although showing signs of a little growth, being much lower than at the same time last year. We must remmeber that last year had already seen the demise of mortgage and loan lenders which very much points to how really abysmal the financial sector is this year. The number of lenders in the market place granting remortgages and mortgages is 26% down from July 2008. The situation does not look like showing any sign of anything approaching rapid growth in the near future. Foreign banks, such as The Bank of China, and the Israeli owned Leumi bank are lending in the UK and hopefully all kinds of financial products arranged through these banks will encourge UK lenders to become a bit more liberal in their underwriting so that borrowing and lending can start to grow again. Heaven forbid that we ever see a return to the extremely lax lending practices which has all but caused the economy of much of the civilized world to collapse, but a little slackening off by the lenders would be most welcome. Some lenders are already showing an ever so slight sign of relaxing their criteia with,for example, Blackhorse now granting secured loans at 80% LTV. Most secured loan lenders have restricted their maximum LTV to 70% for status cusomers and are only prepared to accept to lend up to a maximum of 60% LTV or even less for non status applicants. There is a strong indication that an additional two new secured lenders are on the threshold of entering the loans sectoor. What their underwriting criteria is going to be is as yet unknown. Hopefully these new loan lenders will enable people who could really be helped out with a loan at present to achieve this. These homeowner loans will, with a bit of luck, also include such loans as debt consolidation loans, bad credit loans and even homeimprovement loans, etc. etc. As such there is a little glimmer of hope on the horizon.
http://www.championfinance.com
(Published on www.pressemeldungen.at: September 2009)
