Mortgage News
Santander reports mortgage completions of £19.6bn to September
Santander reported £19.6bn of gross mortgage lending completions of over nine months in its financial report out today and said its net lending growth ‘will be in line with the market’ for the rest of the year.
The UK’s biggest lender Lloyds Banking Group reported a 1% rise in its Q3 lending yesterday but said it expected its lending to come in ‘slightly below market growth’ but that it wanted to protect margin in a low growth market.
However, overall this is a run-rate fall from £20.38bn at the same point last year.
However, Santander lent £3.5bn to first-time buyers and said its interest-only mortgage balances fell £1.3bn to £55.6bn. Its buy-to-let balances increased £1.4bn to £4.5bn.
The bank has continued to build its buy-to-let lending completing 10,000 loans in nine months with a focus on smaller, non-portfolio landlords. This represented 10% of new business flow at an average loan-to-value (LTV) of 70%.
Across all other loans, the lender offered an average LTV of 65%, and lending with a LTV of over 85% accounted for 14% of the new business flow.
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The lender said mortgage net lending was £2.2bn, with the total outstanding balance up at £152.3bn. It said: “This was driven by strong approval volumes and mortgage retention, with around 80% of maturities retained on Santander UK mortgages, offsetting the standard variable rate mortgage attrition of £6.2bn.”
The lender confirmed its total operating impairment losses, provisions and charges fell to £52m, with retail and corporate loans performing well in a favourable economic environment.
Overall for the group, the UK’s consumer finance arm contributed 22% to the global company’s consumer profits, against 19% for Brazil and 10% for the US.