With Robin enjoying the thrills of being a new father, he has left the blog-reigns to me, Richard Seymour – Client Intelligence Analyst at Hitwise UK, for a couple of weeks.
I’ve recently experienced a ‘life-event’ of my own by purchasing my first house, and spent hours searching for the best mortgage deal online. After hearing in the media about the dire mortgage market I wondered whether I was the only one searching online – lucky I work for Hitwise, and I could find out!
After a New Year surge, searches for the terms in Hitwise’s Mortgages Portfolio have dropped consistently during 2009. There was a dramatic decrease (-25%) in March as interest rates dropped to 0.5% and the FSA’s Turner Report proposed restrictions on the mortgage lenders market, and another further drop in May (-18%). A slight recovery (+26%) in June, as lenders appeared to relax their lending criteria, was short-lived as the volume of mortgage searches experienced another steep drop (-21%) in the last week of June.

Over the past six months (between the 12 weeks ending June 27th and the 12 weeks ending Dec 27th), with interest rates sitting at their lowest for 300 years, online behaviour pointed towards consumers’ wishes to fix their mortgage deals. Four of the top 10 largest new search terms (illustrated in the table below) were fixed rate related, with ‘best 3 year fixed rate mortgage’ the highest, closely followed by ‘best five year fixed rate mortgage’. Over this period, one term related to size of deposits, ’95[%] mortgage deals’ the 5th largest new term.

However, over the most recent quarter, (comparing the 12 weeks ending June 27th with the 12 weeks ending March 28th) search behaviour has changed. Consumers, specifically first time buyers, have become more concerned with the size of their deposits than fixed rate deals. Four of the top 10 largest new terms were related to the size of deposits, with ’95[%] mortgages for first time buyers’ the highest, closely followed by ’95[%] mortgage lenders’ and ’90[%] mortgages for first time buyers’.

Over the quarter, ’100[%] mortgages’ and ‘best fixed rate mortgages’ grew to be the two highest deposit and fixed rate related terms, as searches for ’10 year fixed rate mortgages’ and ’5 year fixed rate mortgage’ tailed off. ’90[%] mortgages’ and ’95[%] mortgages’ as 3rd and 4th largest terms in this grouping were still only searched for half as much as the top two terms.

This blog is featured in Hitwise UK’s Financial Services Quarterly Review. Download a complimentary preview of a previous report here.
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