I was pleased to see that the West Bromwich Building Society found a way to maintain its independence and it is certain that other building societies will now follow the same model in the very near future. The government has now bailed out our banking system to the tune of £600 billion and ...

Possibly everyone reading this column hopes that the recent positive signs in the housing market are real and that this is the start of a bottoming out of house price declines. I for one hope this is the case but I am still hugely cautious; generally you only see the bottom by looking backwards ...

The FSA issued a stark warning to Third Party Administrators (TPAs) and specialist lenders that standards were not good enough in relation to arrears management. Treating customers fairly seems to be at the heart of the problem but in my experience there are deep rooted inadequacies in how ...

Recent reports that Prime RMBS has experienced a jump in arrears should come as no surprise; what were people expecting, an improvement in performance! There are three factors causing this deterioration none of which are going away anytime soon. Firstly, unemployment is rising and will ...

Should buy to let be regulated or not regulated? That is a question that has been rumbling on since Mday and I still have the same view now as I did then. In my opinion BTL should always have been regulated as to not regulate it was in effect to create a sub class of borrower. The argument ...

No one likes admitting they’ve made a blunder and it’s no different for lenders and mortgage fraud. Fraud is wildly under-reported in official statistics – millions of pounds of fraudulent loans are written off as credit losses every month because they slip through the net unidentified. ...

Barry Baigent of VA Mortgages in Hertfordshire has won a signed photograph of Steve Collins and Nigel Benn fighting in the epic World Championship boxing match in 1996, courtesy of Exact Mortgage Experts. Baigent knocked out over 530 other brokers who participated in Exact’s white paper ...