Act quickly to secure a best buy mortgage!

There are some fantastic homeloans on offer at the moment, but they won't hang around for long!

It feels like just moments ago I was writing about a brand new best buy 10-year fixed rate mortgage about to be launched by Norwich & Peterborough Building Society – at a stonking rate of 3.99% with a teeny weenie £295 fee.

In fact, it was only a month ago and that deal is now long gone – pulled less than two weeks after being launched due to unprecedented demand.

It’s not unusual for market-leading rates to be launched to great fanfare, and then pulled before the newspaper ink is dry. Indeed, in the current market, it seems that the great mortgage sales really are on for a ‘limited period only’.

But what does that mean for borrowers?

Well, if you see a mortgage deal that tickles your fancy, you really do need to go for it, right now, because if you dither, chances are it won’t be around when you decide to apply.

Sale ends soon!

In fact, mortgage deals are now only on the market for an average of 27 days before being fully subscribed, according to Moneyfacts.

And that’s the average. Imagine what happens with the popular deals! 

Two years ago, the average deal stayed on the market for 30 days, so the fall since then suggests that demand is outstripping supply. 

And this is despite the fact that the mortgage market has actually launched many more products over the last year or so. There are now over 3000 mortgage deals available compared to 1200 at the peak of the mortgage crisis in 2009. 

However, this is still nowhere near the almost 12,000 mortgages that were available at the height of the housing market boom in 2007.

Less dosh to dish out 

The problem has been that lenders have much less money to lend. Their appetite to lend has also decreased as they concentrate on repairing their balance sheets. 

The result of this is that the mortgage industry lends about half the amount it did in 2007, and the lenders’ trade body itself, the Council of Mortgage Lenders, expects this to decrease slightly more this year. 

In other words, there is a lot less to go around. When a particular mortgage product is launched it has a set tranche of funding alongside it, and that money can run out very quickly. Smaller tranches of funding means it takes fewer mortgages to empty the pot. 

As a very broad rule of thumb, the smaller the lender, the smaller the amount of money they will have to lend for a particular deal. And they will have limited capacity to deal with lots of mortgage enquiries and applications. 

This goes some way to explaining why Norwich & Peterborough had to pull its best buy 10-year fix in less than two weeks. The mutual is not a tiddler by any means, but neither does it have the lending, or servicing capacity of the big banks. 

So if you see a deal that really appeals, what should you do? 

Quick smart 

Obviously speed is of the essence, and there are ways you can expedite the mortgage application process. 

If the deal you want is available through a broker, they will probably help secure your mortgage more quickly than you could on your own. Broker software systems integrate with lenders’ to provide quick mortgage decisions-in-principle. Once the necessary documents are gathered, the best systems can produce a fully automated mortgage offer in days. 

This won’t happen as quickly if you go into a branch, use a call centre or apply online to a lender direct.

Some brokers also deal directly with the decision makers, so if there are queries about your application, they can be dealt with swiftly and the case progressed. 

In other words, they do the donkey work for you and push through the deal, usually faster that you could ever hope to. 

Of course, you may want a best-buy mortgage that’s not available through a broker. If that’s the case, you will simply have to be on the ball when it comes to spotting the market-leading deals and applying. 

Luckily, at lovemoney.com we like nothing better than to keep up with new mortgage products, so you can rely on us to let you know when a hot new deal is launched. 

For now, here are some of the best mortgage deals currently on the market, whatever your deposit! 

10 top variable deals

10 super short-term fixes

 Long-term fixes

More: Cost of mortgage repayments falling | How to stand the best chance of getting a mortgage

Use lovemoney.com's innovative new mortgage tool now to find the best mortgage for you online

At lovemoney.com, you can research all the best deals yourself using our online mortgage service, or speak directly to a whole-of-market, fee-free lovemoney.com broker. Call 0800 804 8045 or email mortgages@lovemoney.com for more help.

This article aims to give information, not advice. Always do your own research and/or seek out advice from an FSA-regulated broker (such as one of our brokers here at lovemoney.com), before acting on anything contained in this article.

Finally, we tend to only give the initial rate of a deal in our articles, but any deal which lasts for a shorter period than your mortgage term may revert to the lender's standard variable rate or a tracker rate when the deal ends. Before you take out a deal, you should always try to find out from your lender what its standard variable rate is and how it will be determined in the future. Make sure you take all this information into account when comparing different deals.

Your home or property may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage