Chief executive Nick Chadbourne says this is, “because December saw a barrage of activity due to an ERC date.”

He adds: “There is always a slow start to January too, but year-on-year we are around 60% up and the end of the month had a particularly high run rate.”

Pipeline cases also decreased in January, by 6%. However, the report shows that there were 41% more remortgages completed in January that in December 2021, and that the overcall cancellation rate fell by 1 percentage point, coming to 5.11%.

Regarding borrower behaviour, 43% increased their loan size in January, by an average of £22,245, and 22% cut down their total loan size, by an average of £11,846.

The most popular reason for remortgaging, accounting for 29% of borrowers, was to lower monthly payments.

In total, LMS says, 49% of borrowers reduced their monthly remortgage payments, by an average of £195, and 36% increased their payment, buy an average of £231.

“It looks as though people are still looking to move house while rates are low and, if we had the stock of houses available, the market could still be running like last year.

“The next major ERC date is 1 April, so all remortgage eyes will be on that, while the pipelines in transactional teams also remain swollen, creating capacity challenges for any all conveyancers.”

“The second quarter of this year will soften for remortgages after the big April 1 spike, but this will be short lived as the second half of the year has more product expiries than any six-month period in the past 10 years.”