It is not surprising that the remortgage market has been booming over the last few years. After years of being blissfully unaware that they were being screwed with high Standard Variable Rates, mortgage borrowers suddenly seemed to get wise to the fact that they could slash their monthly payments by switching to a more competitive rate. Despite the obvious signs that the public's taste for paying over the odds on their home loans is changing, lenders have continued to offer products with high SVRs that ultimately drive customers into switching to another provider. But things are suddenly changing very quickly in the UK mortgage market…

Over the last couple of weeks, several of the largest lenders including Nationwide and Bristol & West have done away with discounted rates altogether. This has been coupled with the announcement of a reduction in the Standard Variable Rate on offer from each of the lenders who have decided to offer only variable rate mortgages in future.

The view is growing that the entire mortgage market may well change over the coming months as other lenders also change the way they structure their mortgage deals. Under the new one-rate system, borrowers will be offered only one rate, which is higher than the glut of discounted offers that are currently availabl e, but lower than the existing Standard Variable Rates.

The benefits to the lender are obvious. They are keen to prevent customers remortgage with other lenders. By keeping a customer for the full length of a mortgage, they get to maximise their profits on the mortgage loan, as well as having the possibility to cross sell all sorts of other financial products down the line.

Customers who are currently paying unfairly high Standard Variable Rates are another group who will obviously benefit from any lowering of the rate they pay, provided they are made aware of the changes and are offered the opportunity to switch schemes. They will no longer be faced with twenty years of subsidising the heavily discounted rates that are made available to new borrowers.

Remortgaging is fine if you are looking to raise money and don't mind extending the term of your mortgage or increasing your repayments. But any initiatives that remove the need for remortgaging in order to save money each month must surely be a good thing. With a repayment mortgage, much of the monthly payment in the early years is taken up by interest, meaning that people who remortgage after what is the average of 6 years often find that they have paid back a disproportionately low amount of the loan.

In terms of the long-term total interest bill, it is often much better to choose a product that can be taken with you if you move house, to make sure that you reach the stage where your repayments are actually reducing your debt by a sizeable amount each month. The one rate system will help achieve this by introducing products that are relatively competitive from day one, right until the end of the term, meaning that a remortgage for any purpose other than raising money, is unnecessary.

Keeping up with the mortgage market could easily be a full time job. In fact, for many people it is a full time job, which is why there are so many financial advisers in the world! There are hundreds and hundreds of lenders in the market, all constantly promoting their product lines. Customers looking to borrow money are faced with an often bewildering choice of thousands of products, each with a whole set of different features that make comparison extremely difficult.

Picking the right product from the amongst the many current special offers is not an easy thing to do, and much of the 'advice' is not impartial. There are some excellent mortgage comparison sites out there, that will allow you to enter your product requirements and return a tailored list of ranked products. However, these systems are not without their flaws.

Buying a mortgage is a long term purchase. But in the current climate it is pretty rare to see a mortgage through to the end of the term. This fact makes most of the methods of comparison relatively inaccurate. Most websites will rank the products according to the initial interest rate, which can lead to some products ranking highly that have high redemption charges for five years, high fees, or a high SVR. Others use APR, a measure that is used to calculate the average rate of interest including all fees over the full life of the loan. The total interest bill is another method by which products can sometimes be ranked, but again, this is over the full term. Finally, it is also normally possible to rank the products by the application fees, redemption penalties or other key features.

What we have not yet seen is a system that allows the punter to compare a range of products over the expected life of the mortgage, something which it is nigh on impossible for the average punter to be able to work out. Although our mortgage scheme comparison calculator allows you to do this manually for two products, which is a great step in the right direction, until a comparison scheme allows you to automatically do this across a large number of products, the existence of a single rate is not going to make the selection of the best mortgage any easier.

In many respects, it is not in the interest of the mortgage market as a whole to have homogenous easily comparable products. This would make it obvious which lender was offering the best deal and as a result, everyone would choose their product. Whilst from a competition point of view this is ideal, since only the most efficient lenders able to offer the cheapest products would survive, it is clearly a scenario that must frighten the living daylights out of the smaller lenders who do not have the financial might of some of the big boys.

Added to this is the fact that people's needs are extremely different. Not everyone wants to be paying the same rate of interest for the full life of a product. Many first time buyers rely on the fact that their rate will be discounted for the first few years, meaning lower repayments at a time when their finances are likely to be a little more stretched than normal.

So while some of the major players streamline their product ranges and get rid of the discounted up front rates, we would not be surprised if quite a few lenders fail to follow suit. There will probably be a whole host of product variations in the mortgage market for a long time to come, making sure that the job of choosing the right mortgage remains a tricky one that for many, will best be left to a professional adviser.