Knowledge Bank has added second charges and bridging to its Covid-19 live feed as an increasing number of lenders change products or pull lending in these sectors.

It has also added a number of new categories for residential and buy-to-let.

The live feed was created to help the market, providing brokers with a free of charge, single point of reference for every lender’s criteria, policy and processes relating to the Covid-19 situation. 509 brokers had signed up in under 24 hours in order to keep on top of the rapid number of changes and this number has continued to escalate in line with the number of lender changes.

In addition, 10 buy-to-let lenders have also restricted new mortgage applications by property or job type, while 15 buy-to-let lenders have pulled their products altogether.

After a two-week period that has seen an average of almost 300 changes per day, Knowledge Bank is seeing things quieten down.

Knowledge Bank says the two leading factors forcing lenders to pause new lending and restrict LTVs are the additional staffing resource needed to implement the payment holidays and their inability to obtain physical valuations on properties due to the government’s guidelines on social distancing.

In order to show the full range of Covid-19 related changes, Knowledge Bank has now updated its free live feed so that brokers can search under the following categories for residential and buy-to-let relating specifically to Covid-19 policy and processes:

• Covid-19: Capital and Interest to Interest Only
• Covid-19: Product Transfer Eligibility
• Covid-19: Late Payment Fees
• Covid-19: Furloughed Workers
• Covid-19: Mortgage Payment Holidays
• Covid-19: Temporary LTV Restrictions

Nicola Firth, CEO of Knowledge Bank, said: “The number and type of changes we have seen from lenders in the past two weeks are completely off the scale of anything ever seen before. Not only are lenders having to make fundamental changes, they are having to do it while working from home and often with a reduced number of staff. For brokers trying keep on top of these changes and advise their clients trying to it must feel like a tsunami.

“We have added new categories to our free-of-charge ‘Covid-19 Criteria Live Feed’ lender changes in order to play our small part in helping advisers to keep advising, especially at this time when their clients need them most.”