November was the second busiest month for mortgage searches in the past two years, with remortgaging continuing to dominate the market, according to the latest monthly report from platform Twenty7Tec. 

Its findings show that housing market has continued to boom, despite the government reduction on stamp duty now being withdrawn. 

Twenty7Tec’s report show that in the last two years only March 2021 proved to be a busier month for mortgage searches. 

Remortgages accounted for 43.2 per cent of the total mortgage searches last month, rising to 56.8 per cent when product transfers were also taken into account. 

Twenty7Tec founder Jamie Tucker says this has continued the trend seen in recent months.

The number of first time buyers in the mortgage market also continued to decline  with just 17.6 per cent of mortgage searches in November being from this group. This was the lowest proportion seen since the first lockdown.

With expectations rising of a future interest rate hike, it was perhaps not surprising that there was a 7 per cent rise in searches for fixed-rate mortgages. Twenty7Tec said that every other mortgage type saw a slight fall in search volumes.

Tucker added that in terms of volumes November was “definitely a month of two halves”.

He says: “There was a huge volume of searches and documents created in the first half, and a major drop off in most areas in the second half of the month, although buy-to-let remained an exception.”

November 2nd was one of the busiest days recorded by Twenty7Tec, with  more than 20,000 documents produced on this day via its platform.

Figures show that seventeen of the top 20 days this year for buy-to-let searches were in November.

Its data showed that on November 4th remortgage ESIS documents overtook purchase ESIS document volumes for the first time in over a year.  It added that six of the 10 busiest days this year for creating ESIS documents were in November 2021.

Tucker added: “If we extrapolate [these trends] forward, it could indicate that property transactions through Q1 and early Q2 2022 could be down fairly significantly on 2021. 

“Of course, the new Covid variant could also be starting to play a role in a general slowing down in the market.