As at the end of December 2013, out of more than 40,000 live mortgage accounts, only 0.99% of buy-to-let cases were in three-month arrears, a year-on-year fall of 0.28%.
According to figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) this means CHL’s figures are outperforming the overall buy-to-let market by 21bps as the corresponding figure at the end of 2013 was 1.2%.
By stripping out those cases which are classified as receiver of rent or under repossession CHL’s figures for buy-to-let cases - which have arrears of more than 1.5% of the balance - were 0.15%. Again, this is an outperformance of the market as a whole by 55bps with the CML reporting 0.7% as the industry figure.
CHL’s arrears levels have fallen consistently since 2009 and are now performing at a five and a half year low. The arrear figures at the end of 2013 beat CHL’s own estimates for performance which were set at the start of the year.
Bob Young, Managing Director at CHL Mortgages, highlights that industry figures for buy-to-let arrears have dropped considerably over the course of the year.
Bob continued:
"As is customary for CHL we set ourselves challenging targets at the start of each year in terms of our book’s performance and it is great news that we have managed to achieve our aims. One of our targets was to take the percentage of cases down through the 1% level and we were able to do this in the last quarter of the year.
It is always important for us to judge ourselves against the industry benchmark and it is testament to the hard work of our collections team, and the rest of the staff at CHL, that we have maintained this downward curve.
Following the spike in arrears and possessions across the board post-Credit Crunch and the tremendous impact the recession had on all types of borrowers, to have improved the performance of our book continually over the course of the past five years is something we are all particularly proud of. The work does not stop here however and this year we remain focused on bettering 2013’s figures and continuing to support our landlord borrowers.”
