Keystone Property Finance has launched its first ever product transfer option for landlords.
The facility allows buy-to-let investors to switch to a new rate once their current deals end.
Brokers advising their clients on the product transfer, which includes two and five-year fixed rates on up to 75 per cent loan to value, will be entitled to a 0.45 per cent procuration fee.
Available from July 15, the product covers standard, specialist, and green mortgage ranges. It also gets rid of the majority of fees for returning borrowers, except for the arrangement fee, which has been halved to 1 per cent.
The specialist buy-to-let lender partnered with Core Logic to power its new online property valuation platform.
“This tool will not only allow us to value properties quickly, but it also allows us to do so without having to charge a fee,” said Elise Coole, Keystone’s managing director.
Keystone claims to be just “one of a handful” in its field to offer product transfers to brokers and their landlord clients.
“Very few specialist lenders currently offer product transfers,” said Coole. According to UK Finance data, there were 324,200 product transfers in the first quarter of 2021. Though the industry trade body does not specify how many were taken out by buy-to-let borrowers, versus consumer borrowers.
Compared to the first quarter of 2020, which saw 288,500 product transfers, this marks a 12 per cent annual increase in product transfers across the UK.
Keystone offers finance to portfolio and non-portfolio landlords borrowing both personally and via limited companies.
This year has seen the lender launch into a number of new areas. In January, it completed its first ever securitisation. Then in April, the specialist lender launched a green mortgage range. And at the end of June, Keystone entered the holiday let market.
The flurry of new product releases was an effort to secure Keystone's reputation as “the specialist buy-to-let lender of choice amongst brokers”, Coole explained.
In April, Keystone revealed three in five of its customers had applied for a mortgage in its larger loans range, which offers loan sizes between £250,000 and £1m, since December.
The lender put the popularity of its larger loans down to landlords being able to afford more expensive properties as a result of the stamp duty holiday, which has now started to taper off.
A month later, Keystone also joined a trail of lenders in dropping its rates by up to 0.25 percentage points, bringing the lowest rate in its core range to 3.09 per cent.
In addition, it dropped the lowest rate on its newly launched green mortgage range to 2.99 per cent.
ruby.hinchliffe@ft.com
