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NewswireTODAY - /newswire/ -
Haymarket, United Kingdom, 2007/04/19 - Brokers and banks are missing a trick by failing to cater for the needs of influential female borrowers and investors, a survey by Accenture has found - YourMortgage.co.uk.
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Almost one in five married or cohabiting women now take sole responsibility for choosing a joint mortgage. Just 17% leave the decision up to their partners, with the vast majority (65%) sharing the responsibility equally.
What's more, when asked who takes responsibility for seeking financial advice and obtaining information about financial matters, 42% of women said they alone were responsible. Another 42% claimed decisions were made jointly, but only 16% said their husbands wore the trousers when it came to the household finances.
Yet less than a fifth of the 1,011 women surveyed said their first port of call would be a financial adviser if they needed advice.
Accenture research compiler, Natasha Miller, criticised mortgage brokers who solely target men: "Women need and want advice. They spend 40% more time researching their decisions and are more risk averse than men."
The report also found that, contrary to popular belief, most women take a much more active interest in their finances after they get married or begin cohabiting with their partners. More than 60% control the household purse and take responsibility for day-to-day transactions.
Property market heats up
The housing market is heating up again, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said today.
It claims the pace of property price increases picked up again in March, and that the housing market has bounced back from the repeated interest rate rises of the past nine months, which make mortgages more expensive.
Property prices rose for the seventeenth consecutive month, at the fastest pace for five months, according to the RICS report.
RICS spokesperson, Jeremy Leaf, said: "The housing market has absorbed the initial interest rate barrage, but history tells us that further rate rises could knock confidence and activity significantly later in the year. However, house prices are unlikely to fall in the short term."
The RICS report, while relies on data from surveyors who carry out mortgage valutations, contrasts sharply with information about the housing market from mortgage lenders Nationwide and Halifax, who both reported an overall slowdown in property price increases in March.
Nationwide said last week that, during the first three months of the year, the rate of house price inflation slowed from 3.3% to 2.2%. Meanwhile, Halifax claimed prices rose by just 1% in March - the second smallest monthly increase since August 2006.
Despite this, Halifax reported that the annual change in house prices this month was 11.1%, with some areas like Northern Ireland seeing a 37% increase. But it puts this down to the strength of the housing market in early 2006, and predicts that house price inflation should settle in coming months. "Recent conditions have been more subdued," a spokesperson said.
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