According to the latest monthly report from Twenty7Tec, total mortgage searches in November was 85 per cent of the September levels with October and September being the two busiest months of the year.
Remortgage searches fell by 17 per cent to 601,436 and purchase searches fell by 9.4 per cent to 705,776.
First-time buyer searches accounted for 17.8 per cent searches and fell by 7.2 per cent compared to the prior month.
Searches for fixed rate products continued to fall in November but tracker searches more than doubled compared to September.
Product availability increased to 64.8 per cent of pre-pandemic levels and at the end of November there were 13,069 products available, which was 19 per cent higher than the end of October.
Twenty7Tec noted that the average property value for purchases fell by around 1.4 per cent on the prior month to £333,951.
The average loan required has also decreased by 1.3 per cent on the prior month to £230,128.
Twenty7Tec added that for the third month in a row, remortgage ESIS documents produced outnumbered purchase ESIS documents, however it said the gap was narrowing.
James Tucker (pictured), founder and CEO of Twenty7Tec, said: “Our mission is to remove the wrinkles from the adviser/customer process, to make it as frictionless as possible. Have we succeeded?
“Well, in 2020, advisers performed on average 5.18 mortgage searches per ESIS document they created. That’s a lot of hustle. By 2021, this dropped to 4.02 searches per ESIS document and in 2022, despite the varying rates and greater market uncertainty, this dropped again to 4.001 searches per document.”
He continued: “What’s clear is that even though we have all been incredibly busy since the beginning of the pandemic, advisers have been able to process more matters efficiently by using the tools at their disposal. It’s not mission accomplished, but we’re definitely on track.”
