As mortgage rates increase by 0.5 percentage points and the average UK house price has fallen by £45 a day, mortgage professional vacancies have all but dried up, according to a financial recruiter.

Barry Pendry, chief executive at Pendry Selection Services, told Recruiter that the situation had caused him to refocus on other areas of the industry. “We have not had a secured loan position for four to six months. We are throwing all our efforts into the unsecured financial sector. We are working away from mortgages and we are working on personal loans and HP [hire purchase].

“We operate in the sub-prime market. We made our revenue from the large sub-prime lenders. We supplied staff to them and that dried up earlier this year, so I shifted towards unsecured lending.”