TRACKER mortgage holders continue to be targeted by lenders anxious to get them off them, and onto other less attractive loan products.

Hold on as long as you can, says financial advisor Frank Conway, who urges us to view buy-down schemes very carefully indeed.

“This is definitely a case of what is good for the bank may not be good for the mortgage holders” he says, giving a little background to the product.

Tracker mortgages gained popularity following the arrival of Bank of Scotland into the Irish market in the late 1990s.

Its launch into the Irish market was largely driven by an aggressive pricing policy which was underpinned with attractive tracker mortgage deals.

Irish lenders, fearful of losing market share to the aggressive new entrant quickly followed its lead and introduced tracker deals of their own. At the height of the property boom, it was possible to get a tracker mortgage for less than one percent over the European Central Bank base rate of lending. It wasn’t to last. In late 2008, Irish banks began pulling tracker mortgages for new customers, and increasingly they are trying to woo established customers away from their tracker deals, which were historically generous.