Since the start of the credit crunch last year, we have seen the total number of available mortgages and homeowner loans decline steadily as lenders withdraw products from the market, due to the increased risk levels associated with certain types of loan and their own problems with liquidity issues.

The worst hit sectors of the mortgage market over the course of the year have been predominantly sub prime and bad credit loans, buy to let mortgages and high loan to value products, as these tend to be the areas which represent the highest level of risk to lenders, although many mainstream loan products have also been withdrawn, simply due to a lack of available funding.

According to the latest statistics from Moneysupermarket.com, in the last week alone the total number of available mortgage and loan products fell from 4,930 to 3,785, a total drop of 23 per cent.

As with previous product withdrawals, most of the casualties over last week were in the sub prime and bad credit loans area of the mortgage market. This shows that many loan providers are still continuing to tighten their lending criteria, which means that it is now becoming increasingly difficult for a potential borrower with anything less than a clean financial history to be able to obtain finance through a mortgage or any other type of loan.

Since April last year the total number of mortgage products offered by lenders has gone down by 86 per cent. Apart from the reduction in the number of sub prime mortgage products, a number of lenders withdrew their two and three year fixed rate loans, although this is possibly in anticipation of a further interest rate cut from the Bank of England at the beginning of November.

On a more positive note, there has been an increase in the number of available tracker rate mortgages and also in the number of lenders offering high loan to value ratios of 90 and even 95 per cent.