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The amount  of different mortgages available fell by around  10% as lenders continued to pull rates following last week’s interest rate cut.

There are now only 2,345 mortgages available across the whole market, compared with 2,602 last Friday,down on the 15,599 that were around in July 2007 before the credit crunch first struck.

First-time buyers have been hit hard, with only 32 different loans available for people with a 5% deposit, compared with 38 on Friday and more than one thousand in July 2007.

But 25% of these mortgages are only available to people living in Northern Ireland, while many have such tight credit scoring conditions that it would be difficult for many first-time buyers to qualify for them.

If first-time buyers do manage to qualify for a 95% mortgage they will pay large premium in terms of the rate. The best fixed rate deal available for a loan to value ratio of 95% is currently 6.75%, compared with a leading rate of 4.89% for people borrowing only 60% of the value of their home.

The amount of mortgages for people borrowing 90% of their home’s value is also continuing to shrink, falling to 171, down from 212 at the end of last week.

Mortgage lenders withdraw their tracker rate  mortgages last week in the wake of the Bank of England’s astonishing 1.5% interest rate cut, with 33 lenders pulling their entire tracker range.

The majority of lenders are expected to relaunch products this week.The key inter-bank lending rate three-month Libor, upon which variable rate mortgages are based, fell by a further 0.075% to 4.42%, after a 1% drop on Friday last week. But the rate still remains nearly 1.5% higher than the base rate of 3%, well up on its pre-credit crunch range of between 0.15% and 0.2%.