Hello and welcome to the first Paradigm newsletter of 2024! It only seems like yesterday we were planning for 2024 and wondering what it was going to look like against the many myriad of predictions the great and the good were making at the end of 2023. I think for the most part, no one expected the speed with which it started as Lenders of all shapes and sizes began the year with some serious rate cuts injecting real confidence into the market, and as a result everything seemed to move to the benefit of Lenders lending targets, advisers being able to talk in the positive and be confident with their clients, and clients thinking ‘Perhaps rates have peaked and I can now move or raise finance at a rate which works for me’. It’s often said the housing market is predicated on confidence and January 2024 certainly bears this out. Given the uncertainty that prevailed in 2023, we finally had some good news, the uncertain times that characterised 2023 appeared to have been overturned, maybe the future is not as hard to predict; allowing advisers to advise and clients to plan with confidence, where before they could not. Data to the end of February from CACI which records Lender data on a weekly basis showed an uplift in Residential mortgage applications for the first eight weeks of this year’s collective application total to 185,912 - 30% greater than for the equivalent period in 2023 - which is great news, and hopefully bodes well for Q1 and beyond. Having said all that, I think we do need to be cognisant that any so-called bad or indifferent headlines from an economic or political nature could blow us off course, resulting in some of the feel-good factor being removed and the market moving backwards. What we don’t want is a cappuccino effect, which is a lot of froth and no substance. For a deeper dive into what 2024 could bring, I suggest we look at 4 areas to see what 2024 might bring, namely: politics, technology, costs and regulation. Whether it be a global view or simply looking at the UK, the political scene has been, to say the least, turbulent over the past few years. In the UK, we have had new Prime Ministers, Covid, Brexit and now a technical recession. Globally, of course there is Ukraine, Gaza and the US election later this year and finally, our own election coming soon too. For all the statisticians out there, the US and UK elections are just two out of 64 elections due to take place this year worldwide - with these 64 countries representing almost half of the world’s population. All of these events can add to uncertainty and a lack of decision making until they are resolved. In the UK, we may have a new Government who decides to throw caution to the wind with all sorts of incentives from tax to mortgages, thus creating and continuing the feel-good factor. Add that into several other new Governments around the world and we could have the conditions that will lead to more positivity. The next area, technology is fascinating I think, with regards to where it could go and take the traditional relationships in our Richard Howes Director of Mortgages Paradigm Mortgage Market Update 04 SPRING MORTGAGE NEWSLETTER
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