A new forecast of just 33,258 repossessions this year across the UK has been made by financial outsourcing firm HML.
The firm, a subsidiary of the Skipton Building Society and which manages over £43bn worth of mortgages on behalf of 45 clients, says that 40% of the properties possessed will be terrace houses, followed by flats (24%), semis (21%) and houses (15%).
HML has based its predictions after analysing 320,000 live mortgage accounts.
Its prediction falls short of the 40,000 forecast by the Council of Mortgage Lenders.
HML predicts that the region with the most repossessions will be Northern Ireland, and the area with the least will be the South-West.
Neil Warman, HML’s chief commercial and finance officer, said: “Our forecast shows that terraces and flats across the UK are generally more at risk of repossession than detached and semi-detached homes.
“This trend isn’t new; terraces and flats tend to be the property of choice for first-time buyers and lenders understand granting mortgages to people who haven’t had one before is riskier than lending to someone with an established track record.
“However, all borrowers have to contend with the rising cost of living, employment uncertainty, stagnant wages and the fall-out from the largest cuts to Government spending for more than a generation.
“There is already evidence these factors are starting to impact on home owners, as there has been a moderate increase in the number of borrowers whose arrears represent more than 10% of the value of their mortgage. This is likely to feed through into higher repossessions next year, when we are forecasting an overall figure of between 35,000 and 40,000 repossessions.”
For next year, the CML is forecasting 45,000 repossessions.
In the housing crash of the nineties, repossessions peaked in 1991 at 75,000.
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Comments
40,000 would be good and 33,000 miraculous.
It isn't this year that matters though as unless proceedings have already been started to the extent of at least a Court hearing date being set, then the actual eviction if it comes to that in any current severe arrears cases won't come through until early 2012.
The figures to really look at therefore will be the second quarter of next year as they will have been generated starting last quarter of this year and after the cuts have really started biting and above all, I fear, interest rates possibly starting to rise.
The real figure of interest is the combination of evictions but with borrower voluntary surrenders added to them.
I say this because when I was at NBS the number of keys dropped into the branch as the borrowers gave up the struggle probably outweighed actual physical possessions even with just a Court Order granted, never mind enforced by a Bailiff, by about 10 to 1