Mortgage panic is deepening as families fear that they will default on soaring repayments and lose their home amid warnings of 15 per cent fall in house prices as lenders pull 1,000 deals in 24 hours with interest rates heading towards 6 per cent.
Britain is heading for a property price crash within the next two years as more than two million households face soaring mortgage costs that will see many forced to sell, analysts have warned.
Experts at Credit Suisse said a perfect storm of higher interest rates, inflation and the risk of recession could see house prices plunge by between 10 and 15 per cent.
Jittery lenders pulled almost 1,000 deals from the market overnight in the biggest daily fall on record, amid fears interest rates could climb to 6 per cent next year.
Single mother Andrea Lancaster, 48, broke down in tears as she revealed she does not know how she will cope with rising mortgage costs.
She told MailOnline: ‘I don’t know what am going to do if the rate goes up anymore. Every penny I get goes on my bills, I could end up losing our house.’
And a family of four from Manchester fear that they could lose their ‘forever home’ when their mortgage repayments change next year.
Some bank experts have warned of a potential rate rise to 5.5 per cent by as early as November – as the International Monetary Fund slammed Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng over his ‘untargeted’ economic plan last week that awarded £45billion in tax cuts, which spooked the markets and sent the pound plummeting.
Andrew Garthwaite at Credit Suisse said: ‘The 8 per cent decline in sterling since August 1 should add a further 1.3 per cent to near-term inflation. On current swap rates, the average mortgage will be 6.3 per cent. House prices could easily fall 10 to 15 per cent.’
It comes as the Bank of England today dramatically declared it will buy long-term government debt in a bid to ease market chaos threatening to cause a financial meltdown.
In a highly unusual move, Threadneedle Street said it will step in after the ‘significant repricing of UK and global financial assets’ since Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax-cutting Budget. The extraordinary intervention came after concern that pension funds were struggling with the huge moves in gilts combined with the plummet in the Pound, with some said to have been urgently raising capital.
The Bank’s action is designed to add more demand for gilts and and pump up their prices – which in turn brings down the interest rates.
The Bank said in a statement: ‘This repricing has become more significant in the past day – and it is particularly affecting long-dated UK government debt. Were dysfunction in this market to continue or worsen, there would be a material risk to UK financial stability.
‘This would lead to an unwarranted tightening of financing conditions and a reduction of the flow of credit to the real economy.’
Meanwhile HSBC and Santander have suspended new mortgage deals amid fears that homeowners could be forced into selling their homes or taking up a second job to combat ‘catastrophic’ rises in their monthly repayments.
Moneyfacts.co.uk said 935 fewer residential mortgage products were on the market on Wednesday compared with Tuesday. This is the highest fall on Moneyfacts’ records going back to November 2011.
It is also around double the previous record, when the choice fell by 462 on April 1 2020, in the early days of the UK’s coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
Read More: ‘We could lose our home and nobody cares’: Mortgage panic deepens
