Mortgage customers need to keep abreast of the rapid changes and new products that have recently swarmed the mortgage market.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the launch of Woolwich offset mortgages, the company has announced a reduction in its rates.
The special birthday offer has seen rates being dropped from 3.49 per cent to 3.09 per cent.
Available linked to both Barclays current and savings accounts, the mortgage products allow customers to easily manage all their bank accounts together with their mortgage schemes.
It has been claimed that offset mortgage products have helped clients to save as much as £1 billion.
Andy Gray, head of mortgages for Barclays, said: "Offset mortgages stimulated a new approach to the way people have borrowed money over the last ten years, previously people treated a mortgage as a 25 year commitment, now people are knocking years off their mortgage, saving them masses in interest."
Meanwhile, the standard variable rates of Lloyds TSB and Cheltenham & Gloucester mortgages have been revised.
The changes will see new customers having to repay mortgage at the rate of 3.99 per cent while the rate of existing customers has reverted back to the previous 2.5 per cent.
Despite these changes, industry experts have predicted that customers were unlikely to "desert the ship overnight" as the revision matches the average prices in the current market.
Paula John, editor at Your Mortgage, added: "If it does annoy people sufficiently then they can vote with their feet and they can switch lender, unfortunately switching lender incurs some kind of cost because remortgaging isn't free."
She said that decision by the mortgage provider to revert back to old rates was spurred by the knowledge that bank rates would continue to remain low, hovering around 0.5 per cent, which put tremendous pressures on the lenders.  |
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