"Something has clearly spooked the money markets around 2pm today, and the two-year gilt yield has shot above its peak following the mini-Budget in September."
NatWest has announced increases of up to 157bps across its buy-to-let mortgage range.
The Bank announced: "Effective 13th June we’re making changes to our end dates and rate changes to our new and existing customer product ranges”.
The largest increases are to NatWest's two-year fixed rate buy-to-let purchase deals, with five-year products also seeing rises of up to 122bps.
Residential purchase and remortgage products have also seen smaller increases of 0.20%.
Lewis Shaw, owner and mortgage broker at Riverside Mortgages, said: "I'm no longer sure what level of reality I'm meant to be operating on. This could sound the death knell for buy-to-let, at least with NatWest. Something has clearly spooked the money markets around 2pm today, and the two-year gilt yield has shot above its peak following the mini-Budget in September. This is extremely worrying and I don't know where it ends."
Riz Malik, founder and director at R3 Mortgages, commented: "The considerable rise in mortgage rates on buy-to-let properties underlines the flux in the market at present and introduces yet more hardship and pain for numerous landlords. With each passing day, the financial calculations seem to make less sense. This a significant blow for the entire UK buy-to-let market."
Luke Thompson, director at PAB Wealth Management, added: "Given these latest rates, it seems pretty obvious that NatWest don't want to be in the buy-to-let mortgage arena at this point in time. My assumption is that they want to see where swap rates will go in the coming weeks and once they have a bit more of an idea on that front they may start to price buy-to-let products more competitively again."
