Welcome to this week’s Market Watch, your one-stop guide to what’s happening in the finance world.
This week the building societies have been dominating the market, launching new deals and slashing rates to show they’re a force to be reckoned with.
Mortgages
Leeds Building Society launched a new, shared-ownership mortgage product, aimed at helping first-time buyers onto the housing ladder.
The mortgage has a rate of 5.99% for three years and has an overall maximum LTV (loan to value ratio) of 75%, with a maximum borrower share of 95%. The building society says it’s ideal for customers who have saved for a deposit but cannot buy a property in their own right.
Meanwhile Skipton has been busy making changes to its range. The building society announced it is reducing some of its mortgage products by up to 0.20%. Key deals include the two-year 90% LTV fixed rate, which was 3.38%, now down to 3.18%, the three-year fixed rate at 75% LTV (purchase only), down from 3.95% to 3.75% and the five-year fixed rate at 85% LTV (purchase only) down to 4.69%, from 4.89%.
Not to be outdone by Skipton, the Post Office announced it was cutting mortgage rates too, by up to 0.40% on many of its fixed rate mortgages products. What’s more it has also reduced or removed arrangement fees on selected products.
The largest cut is to its five-year fixed rate at 75% LTV – from 3.99% to 3.59% (a reduction of 0.40%). The £1,495 arrangement fee on this product has also been removed.
Personal loans
On the loans front, Derbyshire Building Society made the headlines by reducing its personal loan rate to a market-leading 5.8% APR Representative, the lowest rate ever offered by the Nationwide Group.
This new rate is available to customers applying online or through comparison websites and is available for loans of between £7,500 and £14,999 for a term of up to five years.
Savings
The Derbyshire’s parent company Nationwide was shaking up the savings arena with the launch of its Flexclusive Regular Saver. Available to customers who currently use Nationwide’s FlexAccount as their main current account or who open a new FlexAccount and use Nationwide’s account transfer service, the Flexclusive Regular Saver offers a rate of 6%.
Savers can deposit between £25 and £250 per month into the account, with no loss of interest if a saver misses making a monthly deposit or requires instant access to their money.
And the AA launched a three-year fixed rate savings account paying 4.00% gross/ AER for three years.
The minimum deposit is just £1 and the maximum £5 million.
