Trans-Atlantic Trends: How are UK housing and New York office markets faring?

This week, we revisit the mortgage market as part of the second series of Knight Frank's Intelligence Talks.

Patrick Gower, a consultant for Knight Frank, and Hina Bhudia, Partner in our Private Office, give their updates on the latest activity in the UK mortgage market: from mortgage holidays, to interest rates and how lenders are coping with the current demand. 

Patrick Gower commented on the market, "The Bank of England released its latest mortgage approvals data on Wednesday and approvals in July for house purchase almost doubled. So we're about 10% below February's very strong pre-pandemic level of house purchasing and we're largely in line with the five year average. We've seen a lot of activity in the sale of houses between £750,000 and £1million, but also crucially quite a resurgence in first time buyers. It does seem like this stamp duty cut is working and offsetting the requirement for larger deposits."

Hina Bhudia added, "The market is busier that we were all expecting. Interest rates still at all time lows has kept the market quite bouyant. However the lenders are still extremely busy and still trying to catch up with the number of applications they had through the lockdown period...this has meant that they've had to streamline where they want to lend."

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