Ray Boulger's Blog
Ray Boulger is widely renowned as the guru of the mortgage industry and expert on the housing market. Ray is constantly called upon by the media to provide informed comment on all areas of the market, and is a regular on the BBC, Sky and ITV.
Last year, Ray was voted guru of the year at the Headlinemoney awards by all of the nation’s money and property journalists. As such, we thought it was high time that you had direct access to him. Ray’s blog will be updated most days so the knowledge just keeps on coming.
15/04/2010 by
On its mainstream introducer range last weekend Halifax extended to fixed rates the policy it introduced a month ago on trackers of charging borrowers an extra 0.2% if they choose an interest only mortgage rather than repayment....
Categories: Property market, Mortgages, Personal finance, Regulation
25/01/2010 by
Bank of China (UK) has an advert on p.9 of Metro today promoting its Bank Rate + 2.3% lifetime tracker, available up to 75% LTV. If one assesses competitiveness purely on rate and ignores the criteria this rate is market leading...
Categories: Bank of England, Mortgages, Regulation, Interest rates
22/01/2010 by
To promote lower rates from today on a third of its 2 year fixes (those with a maximum LTV of 80%) Santander has put out a press release headlined “Demand for tracker deals plummets as homeowners look to make fixed rate hay while...
Categories: Mortgages, House and home, Interest rates
11/01/2010 by
Santander Group this morning sent an email to brokers confirming the re-brand of Abbey and Bradford & Bingley branches to Santander, and indeed the branch in Holborn near my office has already been rebranded. ...
Categories: Mortgages, Personal finance, Miscellaneous
01/12/2009 by
Yorkshire Building Society has announced it is in “advanced talks” to takeover, sorry, merge with, Chelsea Building Society. This is not yet a done deal and the statement was no doubt rushed out as a result of a leak reported by...
Categories: Buy to let, Mortgages, Regulation, Miscellaneous
09/11/2009 by
Below is my November column for Money Marketing, published last week: ...
Categories: Mortgages, Regulation
05/11/2009 by
With today’s Bank Rate decision a forgone conclusion, the only question we had to wait until midday to get the answer to was whether the MPC would extend the Quantitative Easing (QE) programme and, if so, by how much. The...
Categories: Bank of England, Mortgages, Interest rates
30/10/2009 by
Nationwide’s “Real” House price Index increased by 0.1% in October, compared to the more widely reported 0.4% seasonally adjusted rise. This is the smallest monthly rise since the market bottomed out in February but nevertheless...
Categories: Property market, Bank of England, Mortgages
26/10/2009 by
The announcement this afternoon that Barclays are acquiring Standard Life Bank is sad news for consumers, not because of anything negative about Barclays but because it means that one of the dwindling number of brands still active...
Categories: Buy to let, Mortgages
21/10/2009 by
Following on from my blog post on Monday on the MMR I note that less than 24 hours after post the FSA have amended the figure I queried for the increase in property prices over the 10 years to the onset of the credit crunch from...
Categories: Buy to let, Mortgages, Personal finance, Regulation, Interest rates, HIPs
The blog postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the authors and do not neccessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of Charcol Limited. All comments are made in good faith, and neither Charcol Limited nor Ray Boulger will accept liability for them.