Peter Rogerson, commercial director for mortgages, said being a mainstream residential lender meant that Virgin needed to ensure its proposition appealed to the wider market.
“If you look at where we’ve come from we wouldn’t historically play strongly in the new-build market, for example. We’ve invested quite heavily in our proposition over the last 12 months to make sure that we can step up to the plate and take our fair share of the new-build market. We’ll probably double our new-build lending this year compared to last which was also double on the previous year,” he said.
“Last year we did around £500m in new-build lending so that gives you a flavour of where we’ll go, we’re not a tiny lender in that space but we’re growing quite significantly.”
Rogerson added that Virgin’s lending to first-time buyers would also see an upward trajectory this year.
“We’ve significantly grown our lending to first-time buyers over the last 12 months as well and this year more than a fifth of our lending will be to [that niche], which is a big improvement on where we were a couple of years ago when it was less than 10%.”
Virgin is also preparing to up its overall lending target from the £7.5bn it achieved last year to between £8.5bn and £9.5bn. The lender had a market share of 2% at the time of publishing its 2015 end-of-year results last month and hopes to increase this to 3.5% over the next 12 months or so.
Last week Mortgage Solutions revealed that Virgin is gearing up to amend its affordability criteria in a matter of days. While Rogerson wouldn’t reveal the precise details of the changes, he explained that Virgin would be altering its stance towards customers it had previously exercised caution with in terms of its loan limit.
