As per title really. I'm looking for a decent mortgage rate, but can't get to the 70% LTV (loan to value) rate without using every piece of available money/liquidated goods I have.

Would they negotiate if i could get to say 24-25%?

No is the simple answer, you pay what you can afford and your basically wanting to bend the rules.

Shop around and use a advisor who may/may not be able to get you a better rate.

Agreed.

Unless you are some sort of foreign national or self-employed, etc. with lots of non-standard income.

Even if that were the case you would have to go through a broker as underwriters are not going to become involved in discussions with joe public.

Hmmm….I hate banks…why 30% FFS?!

Hmmm….I hate banks…why 30% FFS?!

Sort of because of what happened just the other day, when the banks went into financial meltdown and the whole world almost stopped turning on its axis because they had lent too much money at too high a risk against properties that were over valued by a populace that had failed to grasp the concept of three times your income on a mortgage.

We can't have it both ways; we can't expect the banks to make high LTV loans(aka risky loans) when it suits us and then pillory them when it all goes wrong.

OK so now off the soap box (and I do sympathise with your situation), 30% as a deposit is pretty common these days, but are there not some other deals at say 20%? That's still a decent amount although you should expect the rates to be higher as a result, probably by around 1.5%.

Banks have become very risk averse when it comes to lending for house purchases because of what happened when the last housing bubble burst.

The fall from peak to trough, for some places, was about 30%. If you had put down a 30% deposit then all of your money would have been lost if you had been repossessed. The house would still be worth 70% of the original valuation upon sale and the bank would have got its money back.

Before the last crash everybody thought that asset prices, including houses, could only go up. Therefore if I lent you 100% of the house's valuation and you defaulted in 2 years then the house would have been 120% of the original valuation and the bank would have got its money back again.

HTH

Thing is though, prices in the place I'm buying haven't really been affected, surely that should be borne in mind, no?

It's a good point Daffy but I suspect the problem is a combination of price adjustments being a very inexact and difficult to predict issue coupled with the massive complexity you would introduce by having different mortgages for different geographic locations and then having to manage those products over time.
The banks are now very focused on managing their risk, which is what they should have been doing all along. Complexity simply makes that job harder.

Unfortunately sometimes life's tough. I spent 2 years looking for a house in my budget, that I could mortgage, and in an area I wanted.

You can always try negotiating on the price of the property instead of on the mortgage.

Thing is though, prices in the place I'm buying haven't really been affected, surely that should be borne in mind, no?

So they've not come down yet?

Thing is though, prices in the place I'm buying haven't really been affected, surely that should be borne in mind, no?

Prices in London seem to be higher than they were at the peak of the pre-crash market. I can't see anything to justify that and they look like a massive risk. If I was lending you my money I'd probably be looking for at least 30% coverage.