Buy-to-let business over the coming year is expected to hit a seven-year high, according to a poll of mortgage brokers.

Half of intermediaries anticipated higher levels of buy-to-let mortgage business over the coming year, compared to the previous year, according to Paragon’s quarterly Financial Adviser Confidence Tracker index.

This is the highest level of confidence the report has found since 2014.

A further 21 per cent of advisors in the current survey expect transactions to lift by 10 per cent or more. The poll questioned 200 brokers.

This is an uptick in optimism that dipped slightly in the final quarter of last year, when 41 per cent of intermediaries forecasted more BTL business over the year ahead.

Brokers in the current poll cite levels of demand for their positive outlook. Just under half, or 47 per cent, of advisors described the landlord market as either ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’, up from 44 per cent reported in the final three months of 2020.

The proportion of intermediaries calling the BTL market ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ was the lowest since before the start of the pandemic last March, at 12 per cent.

Paragon Bank managing director of mortgages Richard Rowntree says: “We know that brokers have an excellent grasp of current conditions and can often accurately predict how things will pan out in the coming months so our quarterly Financial Adviser Confidence Tracker survey provides a useful picture of the mortgage market.”

Rowntree adds: “It’s fantastic to see that such high levels of optimism have been recorded following the challenges of the past year or so and that this is being driven by strong levels of demand. The extension of the stamp duty holiday is certainly a driver of that, but it is underpinned by longer-term demand for rental property.”

In February, another survey found that brokers expect to see more BTL customers with adverse credit ratings in 2020.

Specialist lender Pepper Money found 43 per cent of advisers polled said they expected to see a rise in these cases.