Arrrraaaggghh when do you reckon mortgage rates will go down?

[Totallybannanas]

We are due to renew our mortgage in November and despite inflation falling the bank of England is still refusing to lowered interest rates 😭

If I was betting, I'd say august. But I don't think they will come down far, and I don't think they'll continue to come down quickly.

I'm not sure they will. They're at a much more "normal" level now than they've been for a long time.

I think they will stabilise between 3-4% at some point in the next 12 months, I don't think they will go to the record lows we saw in the recent years.

if you lock in a rate now you can still switch to a lower one if they go down between now and November…

Most fixes on the market now will have priced in some drops, what rate are you hoping for? The days of 1/2% are over for some time.

My moneys on August but only 0.25-0.5%

There are only 2/3 monetary policy committee meetings before your rate expires, 1 August, 19 September and 7 November. No one knows of course, but I reckon we might get a 0.25% cut on 19 September. Worth chatting to your adviser about a tracker potentially.

I had this issue last year. It SHOT up. I'd save as much as you can to pay it off to a reasonable level if you can.

Apparently they’re not. The past 10 years were an anomaly, not the norm. They may go down a bit, but nowhere near what we were used to.

You can see in the longer term fixes, the market isn't expecting them to fall much in the next 2-3 years.

You can lock in with your current provider up to 6 months in advance, as soon as a rate drops you call up and drop it again etc it does mean keeping an eye on it bjt worth it. We did this about 8 times in the lead up and managed a rate in January which was 0.5% lower then current rates.

It does take some effort to check weekly but definitely worth it!

BoE may drop base rate by 0.25% at next meeting but may hold off till the following one. I don't see it changing mortgage rates though. Maybe in 2025 mortgage rate will come down, if BoE base rate goes down more, but I think it will be a gradual reduction. Inflation is still an issue, look at your food shopping. Weather could affect harvests so food prices may increase and non-essential spending may drop and more job losses due to that and due to A.I. The future is uncertain. War may escalate. It's a real unknown but I don't think mortgage rates will drop much over the next year.

Aug but not by much quarter of a per cent

I read something in The Guardian, I think, saying it would be likely to happen on 1st August.

And @Scottishskifun
I thought the whole point of locking in was that both the lender and borrower were locked in for the duration.
You can lower?

I can't see mortgage rates going down by very much, if anything this year. They are not going to fall to what they were as that was caused by a very specific set of circumstances and was never going to be sustainable in the long term
Mortgage rates are not far off what the norm really should be so I wouldn't be expecting drastic interest rate falls as far as your mortgage is concerned.

If with the same lender and not changing terms and doing it from expiry of existing product date rather then starting straight away! It's pretty straightforward if you set up Internet banking we would call up say we had spotted a lower rate product so they would set up the new one on the lower rate and cancel the previous one!
We would online accept and then be on the lower rate. They don't tell you if it goes lower hence keeping an eye.

As the lender you can change up to the switch date but the lender is agreed to the rate.

Agreed

The BoE needs new leadership. It was too slow to raise rates and it is being too slow to lower them. If Labour wants the economy to grow, it needs interest rates to be lower. There's a gulf of difference between 0.1% and what we have now. The BoE has plenty of room to manoeuvre but doesn't seem to know what it's doing.

I don't think they ever will. They were kept artificially low for a long time for political reasons.
5-10% is normal, historically.
We've lived through an experiment to see what happens if borrowing is artificially cheap for an extended period but that's over now.

When you originally got your nice low-rate mortgage were you shocked at how little you were allowed to borrow from main lenders compared to what you reckoned you could have afforded? Or did you use a broker to find a lender with laxer affordability rules?

The BoE needs new leadership. It was too slow to raise rates and it is being too slow to lower them. If Labour wants the economy to grow, it needs interest rates to be lower. There's a gulf of difference between 0.1% and what we have now. The BoE has plenty of room to manoeuvre but doesn't seem to know what it's doing.

What did low rates do for productivity and wage growth? A strong economy doesn’t need low rates.

Mortgage rates are not far off what the norm really should be so I wouldn't be expecting drastic interest rate falls as far as your mortgage is concerned.

But house prices vs wages are definitely not the norm so it will be interesting what happens the next few yrs.

I do not think mortgage rates will go down significantly before November, OP, and are unlikely to go down much even 12 months after that. Rates will certainly stay above 3%, and probably above 4%. In terms of a ‘good deal’ 5% isn’t actually terrible (though it feels it when you’re used to a much cheaper mortgage payment, of course.)

But house prices vs wages are definitely not the norm so it will be interesting what happens the next few yrs.

Low interest rates massively fuel house price inflation over and above general inflation levels when buyers confidently over-offer on a house they like because they think they can afford it. Unfortunately it's very difficult to make house prices deflate back towards the norm because people are generally unwilling (or more often unable unless forced) to sell at less than they bought for, so the market will stagnate rather than deflate.

I haven’t stated whether it will stagnate, deflate or inflate. I just think the next few years will be interesting for a number of wider economic reasons.