Mortgages – live: Price war to hit banks as rates fall below 4% Business News

Average house prices in each region of the UK are revealed in a new index that says that the market “beat expectations” in 2023 despite higher taxes, inflation and the wider cost of living squeeze.

Halifax’s House Price Index said property values increased by 1.7 per cent across the board in 2023, although some regions, such as South East England, saw house prices fall significantly.

Meanwhile in other regions, such as Northern Ireland and North West England, the average price of a home increased in a welcome piece of news going into 2024 for those already on the property ladder.

My colleague Matt Mathers reports:

The Conservatives will seek to cut costs for first-time property buyers in an appeal to younger voters ahead of the general election.

With the cost of mortgages having soared in recent years, housing secretary Michael Gove said the government will “definitely” have a new offer for prospective homeowners in place before the country heads to the polls next year.

Riz Malik, of Essex-based R3 Mortgages, said he thought lenders would be “coming out of the blocks ready to grab market share with some very aggressive pricing” once staff return from annual leave.

“Next week is when I’m expecting the rest of the high street banks to really come out and set their stall for where they’re going to be in 2024,” he said.

“They’ll be going after the remortgage market as well, because 2023 was the year of product transfer – a lot of deals were where people stayed with their lender and renegotiated a new deal as there wasn’t a huge appetite for taking on new business because nobody knew where the market was going.

“I think with everything having settled down from there onwards, a lot of lenders will have been reassured that there haven’t been the big drops in property prices that some people anticipated in 2023.”

Mr Malik warned that economic shocks could quickly make deals “a moveable feast”.

“If a lender does come out with something, it might be time to grab it and then if things do improve later on, then obviously reassess your situation closer to the time.”

Here is more from Sir Howard Davies’ claim that it is not “that difficult at the moment” to get onto the property ladder.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What we saw in the financial crisis was the risk of having people being able to borrow 100 per cent in order to get onto the property ladder, and then suffering severe falls in the equity value of their houses, and having to leave and having a bad credit record.

“So, there were dangers in very easy access to mortgage credit.

“I totally recognise that there are people who are finding it very difficult to start the process, they will have to save more, but that is, I think, inherent in the change in the financial system as a result of the mistakes that were made in the last global financial crisis.”

The Liberal Democrats also pointed to the impact of frozen tax thresholds on the public, describing 2024 as the “year of the squeezed middle”.

Research by the party suggests that the combined impact of taxes, mortgage rises and food inflation could be a more than…