See your mortgage in Monzo šŸ  [Mortgage Referrals pilot live šŸš€]

I have two mortgages in Monzo and both have reduced significantly in equity value… My assumption is that the original equity calculation was incorrect and has been fixed, rather than it being down to a shift in market valuations.

1 Like

Hi folks - there’s a couple of things at play here:

  • We previously weren’t updating your property value on an ongoing basis once you connected (it would refresh though if you disconnected and reconnected your property
  • We’ll be looking to refresh all the key data points roughly every month now moving forward and generate some helpful insights along the way, like I gave a sneak preview of in this post
  • The house price data released most recently shows the likes of London had a pretty significant monthly drop of about 3% which has had an impact on our refreshed data

As @caribo said, we’re doing a little tweak to some of the logic over the coming days so I’d welcome your thoughts as it settles down!

8 Likes

Thank you replying, nad clarifying. Especially on a Sunday! The ā€œprogress over timeā€ sounds very useful.

Does that mean the price calculations are regional? So it wouldn’t take into consideration for instance my flat is in Camden, rather than Islington, for instance?

No problem at all! In terms of data - we use the structure set out by the UK House Price Index produced by the Office for National Statistics :abacus:

From one of their pages:

The UK HPI dataset contains information on more than 441 areas in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

In practice, we try to use the most granular data, local authorities, which divides the UK in to >300 segments. So for your example Camden and Islington are both independent local authorities so will be reported differently - it looks like Camden has been much more volatile than Islington over the last 6 months!

Separate point is we also try to do our calculations based on the property type (i.e. detached house, semi-detached house, terraced house vs flats/maisonettes) to make it a better like-for-like comparison :nerd_face:

8 Likes

@hldn90 & @caribo - we’ve tweaked the property values today (last time!) :+1:

Next update will happen in a few weeks when November’s data gets published by the Office for National Statistics :calendar:

7 Likes

Nice! Luckily it has moved on a positive direction than a negative one for me

The new figures seem much closer. Interestingly my mortgage lender calculates my current LTV at 8.95% and monzo calculates at 9.3% … So not a million miles apart… ,:+1:t3:

1 Like

My house is currently on the market so I’m curious just how close to Monzo’s estimated value we get! I’d guess its within 5k

1 Like

Yeah the updated figure looks a lot closer to what I’d expect to see. The old value felt too high.

1 Like

Now I’m curious too! In conditions like this, it is hard to estimate vs the previous 10 years where things were just constantly moving up. Hope it all goes well! :crossed_fingers:

I’ll take that! :abacus: :nerd_face:

What will this show….12months 24 months ?

When will this be live ?

Home updates are now live!
We’re starting the year with a bang :fireworks: with the launch of ā€œHome updatesā€ - we hope you like it!

Before
Previously, once you had connected your property the estimated value was static even when we updated our valuation logic every month or so when the Office for National Statistics released their latest data.

In the (ahem) turbulent property market that we’re experiencing right now, we think it is important to give folks a more up to date view of what’s going on. BUT, we didn’t want to just update your numbers in the background and for you to not know why your equity may have changed significantly since you last logged in.

What we’ve launched :sparkles:
With home updates - you can always find a summary of your key insights like:

  • Progress over the last 6 months (how much you’ve paid off, the estimated home value change and therefore your home equity change)

  • Progress since you bought your home (your property value, equity and loan to value which decides what mortgage rate you can get)

  • We’ll also send a notification every few months to let you know when it has been updated (but the data will change each month)

Why we’re doing this
We think this can be really powerful to help people understand some of the shorter term changes but most of all celebrate the progress they’ve made in their home-buying journey :tada:

:point_right: You can find it at any point by tapping ā€œSee progress over timeā€

Looking forward
I’d love to do more to celebrate progress when you come back in like:

  • You’ve now reached Ā£50,000 in equity!
  • Your loan to value has dropped below 90% and you’re on track to unlock new rates

:chart_with_upwards_trend: And inevitably many of you will be asking about graphs :sweat_smile: to you I say, not yet but all feedback welcome! :memo:

18 Likes

This is amazing! Such a cool update. Great to see the loan to value percentage, and will help planning mortgage deals etc.

I love data like this. Maybe over time it can user even richer data from ONS like property type and postcode level (maybe it does the former already?)

And yes, graphs would be amazing at some point.

Edit: I see you use property type already, sorry! Interestingly though, if I download the ONS data, I can’t get it to match. But that’s probably something I’m doing wrong!

Interesting - it is working for us, are you on iOS or Android? We’ll do some digging!

Hmmm - did you have the incomplete version on Equity & Loan to Value with ā€œFind outā€ buttons (left) or the numbers already calculated (right)?

That does sound a little odd, which we hadn’t seen, did you carry the mortgage from a previous property / ported it?

Amazing work. I think mortgages in Monzo is my new favourite thing. I’m currently at Ā£0 paid (new mortgage) so excited to see and try the new features when TransUnion update soon. I would love a graph or two at some point too :chart_with_downwards_trend::+1:

1 Like

We’ve just done a quick brainstorm at Monzo HQ and think the two are related…

Were we able to find your property transaction originally (you don’t need to reveal anything personal)? There are some cases where we can’t

  • Scotland and Northern Ireland
  • If the record isn’t available at the Land Registry

Back when we launched early on we asked for the estimated value now without asking for purchase date which we have since added in. I think you’ll be able to resolve this by removing the property and adding it back again :crossed_fingers:

I really like this feature. The flow for removing my estimate to go back to the Monzo one was great. Would love to see graphs too.

One minor issue I noticed is that any text which displays the area I’m in (York) isn’t capitalised. As an example, the ā€˜how we estimate’ section does this but I think I also noticed it elsewhere.

1 Like

I love having my mortgage within Monzo, it’s so easy to see what I need.
I have a question regarding where you can see what you would pay with different interest rates.
Does anyone find they match up with other calculators? My monthly amount seems to be wildly cheaper in Monzo than any other calculator. Hundreds out. Am I missing something I should know/take into account?

Nice idea, but I can’t help but think these valuations give people false hope. My lender Halifax gives their own valuation, Monzo is 5% higher. Which might not sound a lot, but it is at London prices. Halifax I believe are using their own index, which is more localised than ONS data.

You make a great point! :slight_smile: I don’t think any valuation is inherently perfect, all you need is to consider two estate agents with different listing photos, a desperate seller or keen buyer to consider that there’s things outside of any valuation model that will impact an agreed sale price or indeed the valuation that a surveyor sent by a lender gives.

In general, we’re favouring financial empowerment by offering folks more information to help them understand their situation better, especially if it has been a while since they bought their home and they don’t have a benchmark (or Halifax) to give them an estimated value - and we make it clear that you can easily edit which Halifax don’t on their ā€œequity viewā€.

In my own situation, my Halifax valuation was pretty solid compared to my own understanding but Metro was considerably off the mark even when I had moved onto them recently :roll_eyes:

For what’s it worth, I do think >300 segments give us a strong foundation and there’s varying opinions of which indices are most relevant in a given scenario:

  • Lender indices (by definition) are only mortgaged transactions and have biases towards their lending policy & residential mortgages and are seasonally-adjusted
  • ONS covers all transactions and don’t apply any seasonal adjustments

I wouldn’t normally defer to a Forbes article but I think they do a reasonable of summarising the approaches in case you’re interested - it gave me some good evening reading! :nerd_face:

10 Likes