Net mortgage approvals dropped to 56,200 in May – the lowest since December 2023 – down from 66,000 the month before.
Net borrowing fell from £4.4bn to £2.9bn. Base rate’s been held at 3.75% since Jun, but swap rates have been swinging on the back of Middle East-driven oil price volatility and lenders have been repricing so fast that some of the cheapest deals have had a shelf life measured in days rather than weeks.
If you’re an owner-operator broker, there’s a version of this market that terrifies you and a version that’s the best thing that’s happened to your business in two years. The difference is entirely about what you do with it.
The terrifying version: fewer people are moving, fewer are applying and the ones who are, are more nervous, more price-sensitive and more likely to shop around or go execution-only because they think a mortgage is a mortgage and the cheapest rate wins.
The version that actually plays out for advisers who show up properly: in a market this volatile, the client who tries to do it themselves is the client most likely to get burned.
A rate that’s live today can be gone by Thursday. A client comparing headline rates on a comparison site has no way of knowing which lender is about to reprice, which criteria quirk rules them out or which product actually fits their real circumstances rather than their assumed ones.
That’s not a marketing line – it’s genuinely true right now in a way it wasn’t 12 months ago.
REASON TO ACT, NOT A REASON TO FREEZE
The brokers who win the next six months aren’t the ones with the cheapest fee.
They’re the ones who turn “rates are moving fast” into a reason to act with a professional, not a reason to freeze.
If you’re not already saying some version of “let’s secure something now – if it drops before completion, we review it, no harm done” to every client sitting on the fence, that’s the single highest-leverage script change you can make this week.
It’s not pressure selling. It’s the honest truth about a market where the cheapest deal has a shelf life of days.
MORE OPPORTUNITY
There’s a second, quieter opportunity in this data. When approvals fall, it’s often because the marginal buyer – the nervous one, the one who wasn’t fully committed – drops out first.
What’s left is a client base that’s more serious, more ready and more in need of someone who can actually navigate self-employed income quirks, credit blips, or later-life borrowing (all of which, as it happens, the FCA is actively trying to make easier to lend against – see the Mortgage Rule Review consultation closing this month).
A quieter market is a good time to go looking for the clients everyone else has decided are too much hassle.
“None of this works if your business is set up to react rather than lead.”
None of this works if your business is set up to react rather than lead.
If your content, your nurture journeys and your client conversations are still running on autopilot from six months ago, a market like this exposes that fast.
If they’re built to respond to this market, this is the moment you pull ahead of every broker who’s just waiting for things to “calm down.”
They might not calm down for a while. Good.
