Most lenders allow brokers to ‘secure’ a new rate for their mortgage clients up to 6 months ahead of a renewal date.

By doing this, it means the rate which has been secured won’t go any higher. Your lender has to honour this, even if they choose to increase their rates later down the line.

Importantly, you’re under no obligation to proceed with the rate you’ve secured. It can be changed, or cancelled altogether, at any point before the day it’s due to take effect (the completion date).

This is where a rate monitoring service like ours is incredibly useful.

For example, let’s say your mortgage is currently with NatWest, and we secure a new rate for you 6 months ahead of your current rate coming to an end.

Your mortgage balance is £180,000, your loan-to-value is 75%, your remaining term is 20 years, and we’ve secured a 2 year fixed rate of 5.00% (with no product fee payable) on your behalf.

Let’s say NatWest reduces all of their fixed rates a few weeks later, and the comparable rate available is now 4.80%. Based on the above mortgage structure, this reduction of 0.20% would reduce your monthly payments by around £19.80 (which is around £475 over the 2 year fixed rate period).

Rightly or wrongly, banks and building societies will not inform you about this important change. But they do provide this information to brokers, and they usually do this around 48 hours before their new rates come into effect.

This process, in conjunction with soaring mortgage rates following the infamous mini-budget in September 2022, led to the founders of RateSwitch building a software platform called Mortgage Metrics. You can read more about this here, or by visiting this page of our website.

RateSwitch is now powered by Mortgage Metrics, which allows us to monitor rates for homeowners in an automated fashion. If a rate you’ve secured increases, there’s no point in us notifying you of this change (because you’re still eligible for the lower rate).

But if the rate you’ve secured reduces, we’ll alert you by WhatsApp as soon as this happens. We are then able to change this for you straight away, and the rate monitoring process restarts from this point.

Lenders don’t set a limit on how many times brokers can do this, which is perfect in a falling market. Since September 2023, the Mortgage Metrics platform has recorded tens of thousands of rate changes monitored (we update this on our homepage weekly).

To get started, just enter the name of your existing lender. You’ll be directed to a page where you can leave your mobile number and email address, and one of the team will be in touch as soon as possible (usually by WhatsApp).

We’ll present you with a table of the rates currently available (with your existing lender and with other lenders), and from there, we’ll happily move forward with the securing/monitoring process if you would like us to.