What Nationwide's 125% home loan means for the property market

Nationwide's new 125% mortgage sounds like a return to the crazy days of easy credit. So is another bubble forming in the property market? John Stepek explains.

This Nationwide 125% home loan has been attracting a lot of attention.

In case you hadn't heard, Britain's biggest building society frequently seen as the 'nice' face of high street banking is offering homeowners in negative equity the chance to borrow up to 125% of the value of a new property.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.