Growth in the buy-to-let market has continued apace, with first-quarter gross lending up £500m year-on-year, data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders has revealed.
Gross mortgage lending of £4.2bn across 33,500 mortgages was advanced to buy-to-let landlords in the first quarter of 2013. This compares with £4.6bn the previous quarter, and £3.7bn in the first quarter of last year.
Nearly half of this lending was for remortgage, rather than house purchase. Nevertheless, the buy-to-let sector continued to grow, and loan performance improved.
By the end of March buy-to-let lending accounted for 13.4 per cent of total outstanding mortgage lending in the UK - up from 13 per cent the previous quarter and 12.9 per cent at the end of the first quarter of 2012.
There are now around 1.46m buy-to-let mortgages in the UK, accounting for around 13 per cent of the total estimated stock of 11.26m mortgages.
Paul Smee, director of the CML, said: “The buy-to-let mortgage market is performing well, against a backdrop of robust landlord and tenant demand for good quality rental property. Loan performance compares favourably with the owner-occupier sector, and buy-to-let continues to grow as a proposition of the overall mortgage market.
“As the private rented sector looks likely to be the longer-term tenure in which more households may live in the future, lenders are actively looking at how they can best evolve their future lending for those landlords who may wish to offer longer-term tenancies to their tenants - although concrete landlord demand for such borrowing is not yet clear.”
