Later life lending mortgage and equity release provider Hodge Lifetime will increase its maximum lending cap to £1m and drop its minimum for 55 + year old borrowers to £100,000 from £150,000 from tomorrow.
The lender launched its 55+ RIO product on 11 June, one of the first retirement interest-only mortgages to launch after the regulator reclassification to standard mortgages.
Business development director, Steve Cox said: “We’re committed to ensuring our product range is widely accessible via intermediaries to help older borrowers across England, Wales and Scotland. We recognise property values differ significantly by region, and we’re making these enhancements to allow advisers to be able to offer our residential mortgages to more customers, so as to help facilitate great outcomes.”
He added that RIO has been extremely well received by its intermediary partners and more product choice can only be a good thing for customers.
David Hollingworth from L&C Mortgages said: “The expansion of product choice and criteria will only help give advisers a broader scope of solution that they can offer to their customers. The launch of Retirement Interest Only and improvements in criteria underlines Hodge Lifetime’s commitment to meeting those needs for brokers and their customers.”
Victoria Hartley is contributing editor at Mortgage Solutions, Specialist Lending Solutions, Your Money and Your Mortgage at London-based publishing company AE3 Media.
She has an MA in Radio from Goldsmiths after gaining a 2:1 in a Comparative American Studies BA at Warwick University. She also holds a TEFL qualification and taught overseas in Mexico and Japan from 1994 to 1997.
Her role includes editorial oversight of the news, analysis and features, event content management and strategic and editorial consultancy for the AE3 Media group. She is an experienced video, broadcast and live-event host and regularly chairs web and podcast debates and interviews.
Multiple award nominations have resulted in two wins: Santander Media Awards, trade journalist of the year and Headlinemoney Awards, mortgage journalist of the year (B2B). Here is one of the award-winning pieces: https://www.mortgagesolutions.co.uk/news/2011/07/21/exclusive-tale-bailey-fraud-witness/
Previous roles include editorships of Mortgage Solutions, consumer title What Mortgage and trade title Credit Today as well as a stint freelancing for a variety of outlets including The Guardian and Which? Money.
