July was the busiest month of 2020, with the number of searches for remortgages consistent with pre-lockdown levels, and purchase levels having quadrupled over the same period, according to data released by Twenty7Tec.
The data also revealed a lift in search levels at all price points, with the largest rise occurring in the £500,000 to £1m region.
Purchase searches rose 22.2% in July, remortgages searches rose 3.0%, and the overall volume of searches in total rose by 15.3%.
Twenty7Tec Group signs agreement with Primis
This is compared with 130.8%, 18.6% and 72.0% in June.
29.17% of demand was for let to buy, 23.23% for shared equity or Help to Buy, and 15.83% for standard residential.
July saw a month-on-month increase of 21.08% in searches for properties within the £500,000 to £999,999 range, and an increase of 17.13% in searches for properties priced between £250,000 and £499,999.
Product availability dropped from 9,900 at the end of June to 9,541 at the end of July.
James Tucker, CEO of Twenty7Tec, said: “July has been the busiest month of 2020 for mortgage searches.
This is not a sentence that I was expecting to write less than a month ago.
“For our business, and indeed for our customers, the speed of the recovery of activity in the mortgage market has been truly astonishing.
“This is not a time to be complacent however – the positive momentum that we have all found both in business volumes and in the speed of technological change should not be lost.
“It will be interesting to watch what happens with the BTL drop off over the next few days.
“Was it a blip after the PM’s tightening of rules nationwide or a pre-cursor to what we can expect in the coming months?”