The mortgage market continues to see lenders vie for position in a competitive environment.
That has resulted in a series of tweaks to rates from lenders across the market as each looks to balance their appeal to borrowers with some clinging on to some margin.
That is good for borrowers in the mainstream core product areas, but also results in improvements in products that had previously been left on the fringes of any price cuts.
That has been evident in the improvements to the deals on offer to borrowers with only a small deposit.
While there was a smattering of two-year fixed rates under 3 per cent a year ago, borrowers will find a wide range of deals well under that marker, with some closer to 2.5 per cent.
Recently, Virgin Money made a number of changes to its range with improvements across a suite of products.
One of the biggest cuts it made though was to its longer-term fixed-rate deals for those with a deposit of as little as 5 per cent.
Virgin Money offers deals that allow borrowers to lock their rate down for seven or 10 years and all up to 95 per cent loan-to-value.
These deals enjoyed a cut of 0.60 per cent to 4.18 per cent on the seven-year fix and down to 4.38 per cent from 4.98 per cent for the 10-year deal.
These are substantial cuts that may have been helped by recent falls in long-term swap rates.
That is good news in terms of improving the options for borrowers, but it is a niche sector.
Long-term fixed rates continue to struggle to attract as much attention as might be expected, even at lower LTV where rates are extremely low.
Virgin Money is one of the only lenders offering deals in this market and sharpening them up, much to its credit.
It is also worth noting that these are available to remortgage, not just purchases.
However, although longer-term security could carry appeal for some, the differential between these and the short to medium-term deals is typically too big for these rates to make a big impact.
David Hollingworth is associate director of communications at L&C Mortgages
