Scottish mortgage lending down in recent months, say experts

Posted: 28 May 2010 13:30:27 GMT

Scotland's lending figures have fallen since late 2009, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).

The amount of mortgages approved in the country dropped from 14,400 in the final quarter of last year to 9,700 in the first three months of 2010.

But Kennedy Foster, CML Scotland policy consultant, believes this decline could be due to a couple of key factors which dominated the two quarters.

He said: "The end of the last stamp duty holiday in December 2009 will have caused a drop in house sales [and] the severe winter weather … will have adversely impacted on the market."

The CML also revealed there was a 28 per cent improvement in the level of Scottish homebuyer loans on the same time last year and it is now only slightly behind that of the rest of the UK.

In the UK as a whole, the CML revealed the number of house purchase loans fell to 112,000 in the first quarter of 2010, down from 171,000 at the end of 2009.


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