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Britons are paying off mortgage debt at the fastest rate since records began almost four decades ago as falling house prices and the credit crunch combine to put a halt to equity withdrawal, the Bank of England reported yesterday.
After years in which the British boosted their spending power by re-mortgaging in a rising property market, Threadneedle Street said equity withdrawal fell for a second successive quarter.
The Bank said there had been a net £5.7bn injection of equity - people paying off home loans - in the third quarter of 2008 after a £2bn repayment in the second quarter. These were the first injections of housing equity for more than a decade, with the trend in the third quarter the most marked since the series began in 1970.
Analysts said the data pointed to a sharp slowdown in consumer spending, since households had become used to boosting their incomes by re-mortgaging their properties and then converting some of the proceeds into cash. The money is typically used to buy big-ticket items, but the near-15% drop in house prices this year has made households much less confident about increasing the size of their mortgages.
In the first quarter of 2007, when house prices were booming and the credit crunch was still in the future, equity withdrawal amounted to £13.9bn - or just over 6% of post-tax household income. By the third quarter of this year, equity withdrawal was negative by 2.4% of income.
Andrew Montlake, partner at the mortgage broker Cobalt Capital, said: "Not so long ago an Englishman's home wasn't just his castle, it was his cash machine too. This is no longer the case. People are scared stiff of recession and rising unemployment and are now paying down their debts rather than adding to them. In this market, it pays to travel light.
"Of course, many people can't take money out of their home even if they want to - any equity they had has either been wiped out altogether or seriously eroded by falling house prices. And even if they have got some equity left, there's no guarantee they'll be able to access it anyway given the stringent criteria lenders have now adopted."
Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: "Housing equity withdrawal has been used significantly to support consumer spending in recent years. Consequently, the sharp turnaround adds to the already intense downward pressure on consumer spending. This reinforces belief that we are in for an extended period of very serious consumer retrenchment, which will be a major factor contributing to GDP contracting sharply in 2009."
- Mortgages
- Equity release
- Banks and building societies
- Mortgage lending figures
- Housing market
- Bank of England
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