Proactive Investors - HSBC (LON:HSBA) has repriced its mortgages for the second time in a week, underlining the chaos currently facing people trying to buy a house.
Asia-focused HSBC pulled its entire range of mortgage products on Friday and issued them again with higher prices on Monday.
Brokers said today, however, that they had been warned by HSBC that these newly priced mortgages would no longer be available from 5 pm this evening with new prices to be introduced from tomorrow.
Fears that the Bank of England will raise base rates far higher and for much longer than had been expected only a month ago are behind the HSBC move.
Economists now see UK interest rates hitting 5.75% by the end of this year, sparking yields on gilts or UK government bonds to surge higher.
Analysts said mortgage lenders use gilt yields as a key benchmark for pricing their products.
HSBC is not alone in pricing and repricing its mortgages.
Spanish bank Santander (BME:SAN), which acquired a big UK mortgage market presence when it acquired Abbey National and Alliance & Leicester, pulled all of its mortgages on Monday and repriced them.
Today, Coventry Building Society also said it was repricing its mortgage range.
Recent reports have suggested a huge problem is brewing for the second half of this year when hundreds of thousands of fixed-rate deals come up for renewal.
Many UK homeowners will see monthly spending on their mortgage surge from around 20% of their income to nearer 30% when their fixed-rate mortgages come to an end later this year and in 2024, the boss of Barclays (LON:BARC) has warned.
Barclays boss CS Venkatakrishnan earlier warned of a "huge income shock" that will affect consumption and the housing market.
An average new two-year fixed-rate mortgage is now at around 5.9% interest rate but at the time it would have been taken out interest rates were still around zero.