Green shoots?

Here goes with my first blog....

For what feels like the first time in at least 12 months we have seen 2 pieces of good news within a couple of days.According to Mortgage Brain, the number of products has started to rise for the first time in 8 months. Personally i have never been a big fan of using product numbers to measure the health of the mortgage market. The vast majority of the products which disappeared were packager exclusives and as we know each packager used to have its own range. Northern Rock tended to have a huge range, its product guide (which used to change several times per week) would make the average Harry Potter book look short. At one point in 2007 i think it had 27 different 2 year fixed rates... so a reduction in the number of products was not necessarily a bad thing. MB's figures show the number of products has risen from 2731 to 3091. without knowing the breakdown of the increase more its hard to gauge whether this really is good news. but lets take it as such.

For a day or so a number of people drew false comfort from the fact that Nationwide had reported that the average price of a house had risen by £3,000. clearly that has to be good news doesn't it? well 1 day later Halifax reported that the price of the average house had fallen by 1.9%. so maybe not. I think its far to early to call the end of house price falls. Whilst there is plenty of interest from prospective buyers until there is a greater appetite from the lenders to lend, prices aren't going to stop going down. The chancellor may do his best to help in the budget, probably the quickest thing to do is to suspend stamp duty for a period. Based on the current paltry levels of stamp duty receipts it wouldn't be too expensive to do this. Well whats a billion or so when you are splashing out tens of even hundreds on the banks and the economy. With an election looming in a little over 12 months the government needs to try to do something to give itself a sniff of a chance of not being trounced. it realises the cornerstone of the UK is the housing market so we may well see a "Hail Mary" desperate attempt to do something to stop house prices falling sooner rather than later.

Whilst it may sound strange probably the best news of the week is that HSBC is going to start a pilot to allow John Charcol to offer whole of market advice in 20 of its branches. Clearly this is great news for John Charcol but it also is a huge change for HSBC which had always said it had no intention of dealing with brokers. This raises the interesting idea of other lenders products being sold in HSBC branches. Lets hope that this is a success and that HSBC expand the scheme to include other brokers.We aren't out of the woods yet but i would rather have 3 bits of good news in a week rather than an endless onslaught of bad news.. roll on next week.