Announcing its half-year results for the six months to 31st March, Paragon Bank’s BTL loan book grew to £12.9bn, up 4.5% compared to the same period last year.
New BTL lending reached just over £649m, while the pipeline grew from £594.6m at the end of September 2023 to £874m by March 2024 — a 47% increase.
Overall, Paragon Banking Group delivered a 13.5% increase in underlying profits to £146.3m for the first six months of the year.
The proportion of mortgages written for properties with an EPC A-C rating continued to grow, with over half of completions within these bands — in total, Paragon lent £345.7m against EPC A-C-rated properties, representing over 55% of new mortgage lending compared to 46% last year.
In addition, over 80% of specialist landlord customers whose products matured during the period remained with the bank.
Annualised BTL redemptions stood at 6%, down from 10.7% during the same period last year, and the lowest rate since the first half of 2015.
Richard Rowntree, Paragon Bank’s managing director of mortgages (pictured above), said: “This is a strong financial and operational performance — we were pleased to see our mortgage book grow during the period, which reflects the re-engineering of our retentions operation two years ago and the excellent work undertaken by that team.
“We were also pleased to see lending on EPC A-C properties account for over half of mortgage completions for the first time; we were one of the pioneers of green mortgages and it’s therefore pleasing to see that reflected in these results.”
“As anticipated and forecasted, new BTL lending fell during the period, reflecting the wider housing sector, but we have built our new business pipeline back to the levels we saw at the same point in 2023.
“We’re also seeing renewed levels of confidence among landlords, particularly those portfolio landlords with four or more properties.”
UPDATE: This article was initially published with the wrong headline. The correct figure of Paragon's Banking Group's half-year BTL loan book is £12.9bn.
