Staff Working Paper No. 760
By Vladimir Lazarov and Marc Hinterschweiger
The mortgage market has played a central role in the global financial crisis. One particularly pressing question surrounds the conditions under which mortgage borrowers enter distress, ie get into arrears or default. This paper develops a novel micro dataset from residential mortgage loans which UK banks and building societies have pre-positioned with the Bank of England for use as collateral in exchange for central bank funding. The dataset is used to investigate the determinants of borrower distress as a function of borrower and loan-level stock/flow characteristics over the loans’ lifetime in the buy-to-let (BTL) and owner-occupier (OO) mortgage markets. We find systematic differences between these two markets, controlling for a range of loan and borrower characteristics as well as macro variables. Our main result shows that, adjusting for affordability, the loan-to-value ratio is reliably more important for borrower distress in the OO market than for distress in the BTL market, contradicting McCann’s (2014) results.
Determinants of distress in the UK owner-occupier and buy-to-let mortgage markets