Mortgage experts appearing before a committee of MPs have given an especially gloomy forecast for the buy to let sector in the short term.

The experts told the Treasury Select Committee that landlords will face a stark choice between increasing rents further to try to break even or selling up because they cannot cover mortgage costs following the latest Bank of England base rate rise. 

Ray Boulger, the highly-respected senior technical director at broker John Charcol, said: “What we’re seeing now is criteria changes and we’re finding situations where clients are not able to proceed with the amount they originally planned to borrow because of criteria changes. It’s not all about rate, it’s rate and criteria, particularly stress test rates, they’ve been changed as a result of rates going up.”

He continued: “When you factor in the other impact of energy price increases and cost of living increases that can have a significant impact on what people can borrow. If you need a mortgage and you need a loan-to-value [mortgage] anything above 50 or 60 peer cent, with the current stress rates it’s going to be very difficult.

“And the knock-on effect of that, combined with some existing landlords selling because of the more onerous tax regime and other regulatory requirements and higher mortgage rates I think is going to have a quite serious impact on the availability of rental property over the course of the next year or two.”

Charles Roe, director of mortgages at UK Finance – the trade body for mortgage lenders – told the committee how the disastrous mini-Budget in September had led to mortgage lenders withdrawing products to re-price them upwards.

“Products were available. But lenders were also dealing with a large number of phone calls and requests that came in from borrowers who were concerned about their finances, would they be able to re-mortgage.

“But throughout that period, lenders were offering follow-on products to those borrowers that came to the end of a fixed-rate product.”

“We’re seeing the markets return to much more stability over the course of the last two to three weeks. As a result of that, swap rates [key to determining mortgage interest rates] have come down and in turn lenders are reducing their mortgage rates.

“When the yield on long-term gilts, so the yield on five-year gilts, goes up, the swap curve goes up, and the cost of hedging a five-year fixed-rate mortgage goes up.”

Chris Rhodes, chief finance officer at Nationwide Building Society, commented to MPs: “It’s marginally profitable for new buy-to-let investors if not loss making to take on board a new property, so I think there are potentially implications there in the medium term for the sustainability of the buy to let market.”