Welcome to This Is Money podcast, sponsored by Charles Stanley Direct. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Helen Crane. And coming up, the mortgage price war continues, but can it revive the struggling property market? New builds are selling at the biggest discount in a decade. Would you be tempted? And how can you negotiate the best deal?

Also today, the Fed cuts rates in the US. Will the Bank of England follow suit? Would you buy

someone's shares for Christmas? And where do Brits really want to buy abroad? Don't forget

to stay up to date with all the latest breaking money news, just go to this ismoney.com.

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investment involves risk. Now back to the show. Good mortgage rates drop below 3.5% before Christmas.

Major lenders, including nationwide Santander and Nat Wesse have all cut their fixed rate deals

over the last month. In the run-up to the budget overall lending activity, including remortgage

approvals, slowed. So will this give a boost to the market? Helen, Simon, welcome. Helen,

firstly, what's going on with mortgage rates? Who is cutting by how much and why?

Almost everyone's cutting, Georgie. So we've really seen in the last couple of weeks the housing market and the mortgage market of sprung into action again after the budget. Sorry to mention the B word again. So so early in the podcast. Yep. Sorry. Since that event that happened a couple of weeks ago that must not be named. Yeah, everything has kind of come back. So in the last week or so,

we've seen Barclays, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander, and some others all reduce their mortgage rates.

So that's for a couple of reasons. Partly is because everything has gone really quiet in the housing

market in the last couple of months for that same reason. Banks obviously have targets

to hit for how many mortgages they lend and they're probably in danger of missing those targets

because things have been so slow. So in order to get new customers in, they're offering these

really sort of tasty mortgage deals to try and make people go to them rather than their competitors.

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