UK home owners take advantage of low interest rates

BBC news reported last week that homeowners have been paying off record amounts of their mortgages over the course of the past year. In total UK homeowners paid off £22.3bn last year! We believe this is great news for the housing market and therefore the property investment market.

The reason for this is simple:

When the banks dropped their interest rates, UK home owners on a tracker or variable rate mortgage had 2 choices:

–          Spend their increased discretionary income as they wish living a better lifestyle with luxury goods or,
–          Invest their increased discretionary income back into their property.

Now this piece of news shows that the majority of UK homeowners have chosen to do the latter…

Well done UK! The reason this is so good for us as a nation is that we, and therefore the banks, are now not so heavily leveraged on our properties and when the Bank of England inevitably raises the interest rates, we will still be able to afford the repayments on our now smaller borrowings.

This piece of reassuring news can put your mind at rest that the UK house prices should remain buoyant and we will not see the “dead cat bounce”

Others will argue that the idea of lowering interest rates is to get the UK homeowners to spend their increased discretionary income in the consumer markets, However, I don’t agree.

As interest rates dropped UK homeowners continued to keep the consumer markets ticking over as they paid off their mortgages. It would seem we have got through the hard stage and now we are in a good position to continue spending in the consumer markets, whilst maintaining our now lower mortgage repayments… Either way we see this as good news!