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With the General Election now over, it asks the question of how the new government will affect the public, specifically people who are looking to buy a house and get a mortgage deal. The Venmore Group Co-Founder Robert Farnham, comments on how the General Election will affect the UK housing market:

"Our experience over past general elections has been during the campaigning and uncertainty prior to an election the market stands still. That wasn’t the case with this election, where we saw no change in the improving positivity of the market this year in comparison to last.

There was a slight delay in people completing their purchases waiting for the election, however, this week has seen a flurry of activity of people wanting to crack on and get deals completed.

The incoming government have made it clear that they wish to increase home ownership specifically with help for first time buyers, speeding up the planning process and changing regulations on green belt. All of these policies are long term and unlikely to impact our local markets within the next 2 years.

We would see three main things impacting on our local markets in the short term, interest rates, VAT on schools and changes to Section 21 notices.

Base rate is predicted to begin reducing this year and continue to reduce slowly until early 2026 from the current rate of 5.25% to around 3.5% according to economists from HSBC.

This predicted drop is already showing in current mortgage deals for both home movers with equity and also for first time buyers. Their view on house pricing is that it would remain fairly stagnant through the remainder of this year and next while households rebalanced their finances and wage increases reduced.

Home movers with equity have the best rates available, the most attractive rate as of July 9th is 4.2% for a 5 year fix and 4.64% for a 2 year fix. There is an incredible amount of choice of deals, our brokers have access to over 3,000 different packages, taking good quality advice has never been more important.

The pledges on first time buyers will be interesting to see, lenders are getting more competitive on first time buyers with a 10% deposit, 2 year deals are around the current base rate and 5 year deals 4.83%. Again, advice is critical as deals vary daily as does the lender fee structure. It’s a similar story on shared equity purchase, more products available and the need to take advice from brokers experienced in shared equity.

Locally we have many excellent schools, focus on catchment and ease of commute has always been a factor, it’s kept the market specifically within catchment for Grammar schools buoyant through every interest rate crisis, recession, general election we’ve seen, VAT on school fees will continue this.

Finally, section 21 notices for no fault evictions will cause some churn in the buy to let market and we would see the continued trend for professional landlords to continue growing their portfolio’s whilst landlords with singular or small portfolio’s look to change their investment plans which is the continuation of what we have seen over the past 18 months.

In conclusion a positive outlook for the housing market, better mortgage rates, stability in government for a period and an intent to increase home ownership combined with reducing planning red tape."