Bank of Ireland is withdrawing its mortgage products in Britain for eight days while it reprices the home loans. Analysts say the procedure mirrors actions taken by other mortgage lenders.
A spokeswoman said that since January, its mortgages division in the UK has been receiving record volumes of business and the short term withdrawal is to deal with the backlog of new applications.
Its subsidiary Bristol & West also withdrew some of its range earlier this week. Its Northern Ireland operations are not affected.
In its interim results to the end of September, Bank of Ireland said its UK operations made up 58% of its total mortgages. The UK mortgage portfolio was worth £25 billion, more than its Irish residential mortgages.
In a trading update published in February, the bank said the dynamics in the UK mortgage market had changed with an 'improvement in pricing'.
Also today, before the Bank of England's decision to cut rates by 0.25 points, the UK's second biggest mortgage lender said it was increasing the cost of some of its fixed-rate products for the second time in two weeks.
Nationwide Building Society said it was raising interest rates on some of its fixed-rate products by between 0.12 and 0.32 points from tomorrow. It is two weeks since Nationwide last increased the cost of its fixed-rate deals, raising them by 0.2 points.
The new mortgages are available only directly from Nationwide and cannot be taken out through intermediaries.
The UK mortgage market is currently changing on a daily basis as lenders raise their rates, increase the deposits they demand and withdraw deals that are attracting too much business. The pace of change has accelerated in the past few weeks as the problems caused by the credit crunch intensify.
In the UK there are now just 4,242 different mortgage deals available, compared with 15,599 at the beginning of July before the credit crunch first hit.
