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H/T to hpcwatcher who posted a link to the same story in the Financial Times. Fortunately the priceless quote that I wanted to preserve for posterity is also in the Mortgage Solutions piece on the same story, so I'll link to that - Skipton hikes fixed rates to ease 'unprecedented' demand. The quote is from their Head of Intermediary Sales, (which I guess it the employee charged with taking care of the lending that comes in via mortgage brokers), a certain Paul Darwin. I've taken the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that the way that mortgage lending works is that the bank or building society will target a certain amount of lending against a given 'deal'. It seems to me almost certain that as the FLS money is now over for non-BTL residential mortgages their talk of service and pipelines is nonsense. I assume that they've got a certain amount of funding lined up, very possibly some of it FLS facilitated. On the basis of this a certain fixed maximum of amount of lending at these rates can be done. Hence they know that they've £ x million to lend at whatever it was, somewhere between 2.5% and 3.5%. However, now that the product is in the marketplace, they see the volume of applications and it's massive. Hence they are confident that they are easily going to shift all the FLS facilitated cheap money that they've drawn down at the cheap rate so they are now going to see if they can still shift it at a higher rate and bung on 0.71%. Gilts are certainly steady and if anything they are tracking slowly down away from the 3% highs in yield of the summer. Certainly ISA rates remains on their *rse. Taken together this would suggest that this lending is getting cheaper to fund and thus the 'demand' means that they are being able to make the loans at even higher rates than they envisaged. That must be doing wonders for their spreads! The bank recapitalisation through profitable lending part of FLS appears to be working very nicely. Shame about the need to bypass any kind of democratic conversation about a plan that involves ripping the faces of retail savers so that pwoperdee mad jokers can refinance cheaply, or just bid up prices further, and so that more of our incomes can be tapped for supporting our crap banks. Same old same old. Just thought this was a particularly obvious case. Shocking that the FT don't bother to scratch beneath the surface of the story. All they appear to have done is regurgitate the flummery of the Chief Skipton Debt Pimp to the Ghastly Mortgage Brokers, sorry, Skipton's Head of Intermediary Sales.