The chancellor’s interventions in mortgage market could help ‘avoid mass repossessions of the 1990s’, according to Jonathan Rolande, from the National Association of Property Buyers.
Speaking after Jeremy Hunt outlined measures to help homeowners with the rising monthly mortgage payments, he told GB News that the chancellor had revealed three key measures that could help avoid a market crash.
He explained: We’ve got the ability to speak to banks without threatening your credit score, so you can be honest with them, and you can tell them that times are tough and discuss what your options are, and they’ll talk to you and hopefully be very helpful without it impacting in the future.
“The second point is that you can then swap your mortgage from a repayment to an interest only mortgage. That will then reduce payments on average by a couple of hundred pounds a month, which will really absorb quite a lot of the recent increases that we’ve seen.
“The third point is that if people are really struggling, banks won’t step in to repossess until a year has passed from the initial difficulty.
“So, we’ve got three really, really important points: They’re going to be very useful.”
Rolande, from the National Association of Property Buyers, was asked by host Philip Davies MP if the intervention wasn’t just “kicking the can down further down the road?”
“That’s the gamble that Jeremy Hunt has taken. I think in many ways he was damned if he didn’t damned if he didn’t.
“He can’t put more money back into our pockets because that will fuel inflation, so interest rates have risen.
“But he felt he couldn’t – and I think most property people agreed with him – start helping people with his mortgages in the way that they did, for example, with wages during Covid.
“There’s just not enough taxpayers’ money left anyway, even if they wanted to.
“His options were limited, but I think that this will be a big relief to people who really need it.”
Rolande praised the “targeted relief” from the government which helps everybody, rather than a “scattergun approach”.
“The property market is floundering at the moment, and this will help.”
“The reason for that is that if we can avoid mass repossessions as we saw back in the 90s, prices will be sustained.
“So if that’s what you want, this is good news.”
