This is the first time that there have been more than 13,000 mortgage products available in the UK since March 2020.
However, this is still only 65% of the products available prior to the pandemic, and with demand rising, Phil Bailey, director at Twenty7Tec has warned that supply continues to be an issue.
The market has edged nearer to seeing an average split of purchase and remortgages in the long-term, currently at 65:35 down from recent highs of 70:30.
First-time buyers’ searches remained over 20% of the total in June 2021, despite the impending end of the stamp duty holiday for properties from £250,000 to £500,000.
The 95% Mortgage Guarantee Scheme is working, Twenty7Tec reported, with searches in Q2 on average 5.15% of the market versus 1.37% in Q1.
By the end of June 2021, 95%-plus searches accounted for 4.36% of all mortgage searches on Twenty7Tec’s systems.
Further data shows that June 2021’s maximum day for searches as a percentage of the best day year to date was 7 April, when it reached 86%.
Although June was busy, there were no days during the month that hit the top 30 busiest days year to date for producing ESIS documents.
In June 2021, average searches per document produced remained at 3.5, the long-term average.
Phil Bailey, director at Twenty7Tec, said: “The end of June saw a huge final push for closure of documents. It’s quite funny that we bash solicitors constantly for being really slow and inefficient.
“But it’s amazing how, when there’s a financial, commercial element how quickly they suddenly get stuff through.
“Lenders, brokers, solicitors, conveyances, the land registry, everyone just upped their game.
“I think that one big lesson from the past year is that the various parts of the market are, slowly, coming together a little more and understanding about the timeframes in which each works.
“Being able to predict with more certainty how various parts of the market will react to changes, is critical to the evolving mortgage and housing landscape. Surely data has a big part to play here?”
“The proportion of people who are self-employed as a total of all searches has been steadily increasing recently.
“Over the past two years, the average is 8.40% of all searches.
“In 2020, it’s 9.42% of all searches and in June 2021, it was 9.52% of all searches.
“There’s a lot of talk of the future of work at the moment and it’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing more self-employed people looking for mortgages.
“Have the products evolved to suit these new circumstances? Are the economic conditions right for lenders to lend to the self-employed right now? That’s harder to say.
“The last 12 months, we’ve seen just shy of a million self-employed searches – 926,344.
“We saw a huge rise in the number of products on the market this month – up 804 products.
“Yet we’re still only at 65% of the previous volumes of products on the market.
“So, given that all searches and ESIS document volumes are still well up on the highs of last year, every product is having to work harder as demand is outstripping supply.”
