Safe as houses: Aldermore Group mortgage origination up 60 per cent
Aldermore Group today revealed that the number of loans it had created in its first quarter of the year had leapt up, causing its share price to shortly follow suit.
Loan origination for the challenger bank rose to £814m for the first quarter of 2016, up 43 per cent on the prior year's £568m.
Mortgage origination was strong, growing to £542m, up 60 per cent on £338m in 2015. In particular, the bank's buy-to-let audience seemed to be in a rush to beat tougher taxes, with origination up 144 per cent at £327m.
"We have made an excellent start to the year with our best ever quarter of origination as we delivered double digit growth in new lending in both our business finance and mortgages divisions," said Phillip Monks, chief executive. "We took advantage of the anticipated extra demand for buy-to-let mortgages, ahead of the introduction of the additional stamp duty from 1 April, and more than doubled our buy-to-let origination compared with the first quarter of 2015."
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Business finance lending also grew for Aldermore, albeit less dramatically than its mortgage offering. Business finance origination rose to £272m, up 18 per cent from £230m.
Meanwhile, the total number of deposits had inched up to £6.2bn, up seven per cent compared with £5.7bn at the end of December 2015, while customer numbers were also up to around 133,000, an increase of eight per cent.
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Monks added: "Market conditions in the first quarter of 2016 remain broadly consistent with those experienced last year, with a relatively benign credit environment and interest rates unchanged. We continue to focus on our strategy of supporting UK SMEs, homeowners, landlords and savers and remain confident of delivering on all of the guidance we set out with our recent 2015 full year results, including generating nominal net loan growth in line with recent run rates and strong returns on equity."
At time of writing, shares in the company were trading up 7.9 per cent at 199.6p.