Understanding Housing Market Data
A brief tour of the Council of Mortgage Lenders website gives much food for thought; and it is obvoiusly a superb source of housing market statistics. We plan to publish (and comment on) these statistics on a regular basis. However, we thought that a brief explanatory overview of the organisation might be a good place to start. 
Who are the Council of Mortgage Lenders?
The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) is the trade association for the mortgage lending industry. That is, they are the representative voice for the residential mortgage lending industry and the central provider of economic, statistical, legal, research and other market information. This, of course, is what makes their published statistics so valuable to anybody who is commentating on the housing market.
CML membership includes banks, building societies and other mortgage lenders. Associated members include solicitors, conveyancers, search companies and management consultants. The stated goal of the organisation is to: “promote a thriving environment for the UK housing and mortgage markets.”
CML Statistics
The CML compile and publish a range of statistics on the UK housing and mortgage markets including key data on:
- mortgage lending
- arrears and possessions
- payment protection insurance
- buy-to-let
- lending in Scotland
Some of their statistics are available to members and associate members only, however, the publicly available figures are broed enough to be both useful and interesting.
Financial Reporting
When all is said and done, the CML is essential a financial organisation and, therefore, their reports tend to come out at key points during the fiscal year. The financial world splits its calendars into quarters, each of which is three months long. To complicate things even further, the quarters are arranged to fit in with the tax year rather than the calendar year! Here are the dates of the financial quarters:
- Quarter 1 : April to June
- Quarter 2: July to September
- Quarter 3 : October to December
- Quarter 4 : January to March
Obviously at the end of a quarter it takes time for financial institutions and organisations to collate the data, so reports for, say, Quarter 2, will usually be published around the end of October. So, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to guess what we’ll be concentrating for the next few posts!
