What are the best mortgage rates? Mortgage Interest Rates explained.

What are the best Irish mortgage rates? What are interest rates and where do they come from? These are all good questions and in today’s post I hope to answer some of them.

Often I find that people call me and ask ‘what’s the best rate’ and then there is silence on the other end of the phone as they await an answer. The truth is that at any given time there is a ‘best mortgage rate’ out there, but normally there are restrictions surrounding it which inhibit the ability for most borrowers to avail of them.

We have come out of eight rate hikes which began at the end of 2005, and in an upward rate market people often feel that their old loan has become expensive, in fact it’s not necessarily the case that the ‘old loan’ is exceptionally dear, its that the rate market has gone up and therefore the cost of all loans has gone up, when we talk about the greater ‘debt burden’ that’s what we are referring to, because car loans, higher purchase, leases, …

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Ulster Bank, cutting out brokers, and perhaps Consumers too?

I guess the best thing to do is quickly outline the way things have worked since the inception of the broker industry in Ireland.

Brokers start their own companies and place business with larger companies, there are several types of brokers, some are tied (this means they only place business with one company) and independent – which is what Irish Mortgage Brokers are – and we have a panel of 15 banks and 5 insurance companies.

We have traditionally been paid 1% of the loans we send a bank as a ‘commission’ or income, so the client normally doesn’t have to pay a broker fee because the costs are covered by the commission. Brokers are paid because broker business (which counts for almost 60% of all mortgages done in this country) is a clean and profitable source of business for banks, they don’t have to pay for the brokers staff, their light, heat, holiday time etc. They do however have to pay for all of these things when a loan is done at branch level (e.g.: the loan is done …

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