Over the six months to 30 September 2013, the Nationwide Group increased its gross mortgage lending by 37% to £14 billion.

This means the UK’s largest building society accounted for 15.4% of all UK residential mortgage lending, its highest six month lending period for five years.

This is up from £10.2 billion over the same period in 2012/13 and means that Nationwide is lending £13.2 million every working hour.

Over the same period, the Nationwide Group’s net lending was £5.6 billion, up 75% on that achieved in the same period in 2012/13 and equivalent to a market share of 82.8%.

During the half year, Nationwide provided mortgages to more than 30,400 first time buyers, a 52% increase on the same period last year, accounting for more than one in five first time buyer mortgages in the UK. It helped 1,169 customers a week to access new prime mortgages and accounted for 22% of all first time buyer lending in the UK over the period.

Chris Rhodes, Nationwide’s executive director, said: “As you might expect from the UK’s largest building society, Nationwide has continued to focus on first-time buyers and on promoting the link between saving and access to low deposit mortgage deals. We have continued to reserve our best deals for our existing customers while giving additional help to first time buyers and those with small deposits, including through our Save to Buy scheme.

“As a result, we have increased our gross mortgages lending by over a third and our net mortgage lending by 75 per cent compared to the same period last year.”