As the average age of first time buyers rises, an increasing number of us face becoming OAP mortgagees.

Current account holders of the Co-operative Bank are now able to avail of a new five year fixed rate mortgage.

Grant Shapps, the housing minister, last week called for long-term fixed contractor mortgage rates in order to help households struggling to organise their finances.

Freelancers hoping to get their first contractor mortgage might be interested to learn of a suggestion made by the director general of the CBI. John Cridland recently suggests that first time buyers should be allowed to tap into their pension fund to help raise the necessary funds to buy their first property.

Contractor mortgage borrowers now have four times the amount of debt people had back in 1991 and yet they only pay slightly more interest.

According to Bellway, the housing market is returning to normal. The firm made the statement last week when it announced both its sales and profits were recovering.

It’s been a difficult few years for people wanting to get a contractor mortgage and many of them have had to rent a property until they could save enough money for a deposit on the their own home.

People looking for a contractor mortgage may be interested to learn that Rightmove says it now costs more than twice as much to buy a property in the south than it does in the north.

The number of people putting their home up for sale dropped last month, as the housing market continued to be affected by economic turmoil.

People looking for a contractor mortgage will be delighted to learn that HSBC is planning to lend more to first time buyers.

New research by valuers Connells suggests that contractor mortgage activity picked up in September, and the number of valuations rose by over a third month-on-month.

Buy to let is becoming more popular as a lack of first time buyer mortgage finance forces more and more people into renting.