Mortgages

The nation's dinner parties have long held house prices as one of their stock topics of conversation.

Buy-to-let lender Precise Mortgages will start lending to homeowners, in a move which could bring hundreds of millions of pounds of new credit to the mortgage market.

House purchase approvals continued to weaken in September reflecting low demand, according to Bank of England figures.

Woolwich has announced that all mortgages taken out above 75% LTV will now have to be on a capital repayment basis only, as part of a raft of changes to its interest-only deals.

The regulator this week hit back at CML claims almost four million borrowers would have been denied a mortgage if Mortgage Market Review (MMR) proposals had been in force between 2005 and 2008.

The FSA has hit out at a number of the "bigger" lenders over their concerns about verifying income for the self-employed or those with irregular earnings.

Tesco Bank has signed a five year agreement with Vertex, a global provider of customer management outsourcing, to support its planned entry into the mortgage market in early summer 2011.

Britain has been steeling itself for the deficit busting austerity package that the Coalition announced shortly after the election.

Gross mortgage lending totalled an estimated £12bn last month which is the lowest September figure since £10bn in 2000.

LSL Property Services has agreed the £1.59m acquisition of mortgage and insurance distributor Advance Mortgage Funding Ltd, trading as Pink Home Loans.