According to the broker, more high street and specialist lenders relaxing their criteria and featuring more favourable serviceability calculations has led to them being able to place a large number of these enquiries.

It has been said that over the last 18 months, traditional buy to let lenders, as well as all the high street banks, have become much more stringent in the way they assessed rental income, with rental assessments virtually removing them from the market unless the rentals were significant, or the borrowing was below 50% LTV.

Sales manager, Peter Turner, said: “Now we are seeing lenders happy to lend on HMO’s (House of Multiple Occupancy), Limited Company BTL’s, and we are even seeing the return of ex-pats and foreign national investment loans being agreed.”

Steve McCarthy at Property Specialists, in Brentwood, added: “There has been a real reticence, especially from the banks recently, but I have definitely seen an improvement in the last two months. Lenders are now looking at assessing calculations on interest only and are happy to take shorter leases when assessing applications, this is good news.”