According to Twenty7Tec’s latest mortgage market report, over 20,000 ESIS documents were created on its platform in a single day, the second busiest day over the past 12 months. It added that six of the ten busiest days this year for creating ESIS documents were in November.
In November, there were 1.4m searches with 57 per cent being purchase searches and the remaining 43 per cent being remortgage searches.
On the purchase side, searches have been falling month-on-month since September, with searches during the month pegged at 62 per cent and falling to 59 per cent in October.
For remortgages, the proportion has been growing over the past few months, accounting for 38 per cent of September searches and 41 per cent of October searches.
Buy-to-let also saw heightened activity, with 17 of the top 20 days occurring in November.
First-time buyer searches have remained relatively stable at around 18 per cent, similar to levels seen in October and September.
Searches for self-build mortgages also increased by nearly half to 1,691 in November compared to October, whilst standard residential, standard including shared equity and Help to Buy, shared ownership, shared equity and Help to Buy all grew by between five and eight per cent.
Searches for fixed rate products also grew by seven per cent, whilst stepped, tracker, discount, variable, capped and Libor all fell slightly.
Searches across all loan to value bands and property values also rose.
Credit criteria
The report said added that searches on credit default criteria rose by nearly half on the previous month, with four of the top ten most commonly requested searches in the Twenty7Tec system mentioning credit history.
Twenty7Tec’s chief executive James Tucker (pictured) said that in terms of volumes, November was a “month of two halves”.
He explained: “Huge volumes of searches and documents created in the first half, and a major drop off in most areas – buy-to-let being the exception – in the second half of the month.
“If we extrapolate this 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.”
