Cian Carolan

So yeah, look, I wouldn't say there's huge appetite for variable rates.

It's generally circumstantial.

Longest mortgage term or longest fixed rate?

Okay, so I'm really happy that we took a seven-year fixed rate when we did because we will benefit from those historic low rates for the next three and a half years.

So for us, that served us really, really well.

And we didn't plan to move.

We might still move, I don't know.

But for us, the longer fixed position locking in that low rate, not that I knew what was coming, nothing like that.

But for us, we wanted certainty for as long as we could get it.

There can be really good reasons why you don't fix for too long.

And that could be we plan to do significant works to the house and you don't want to be tied just to the lender that you're with.

You want to be able to look at other lenders as alternative.

You want to always be able to do market based research and have every lender on the table when you next do a significant job to the house or if you're moving house, you don't want to pigeonhole yourself.

So you might not fix for too long if you know you're going to be doing a big job to the house in two or three years time.

Or if you think that you're in a house that you're going to grow out of very soon and you might want to move house in the next couple of years, that might also be a reason not to fix.

So it's not just market conditions.

You might not just say, well, I could fix at that rate for seven years, not three years.

But there could be loads of reasons why you don't take the seven year because you don't want to be locked into something that you need to get out of and you don't know what the penalty position could look like.

So if you're buying a new build and all the work is done to it and you see yourself being there for a long time, you know, when you're in a rising interest rate environment, it can be quite attractive to commit at a rate for a long period of time.

It's a roundabout way of answering it, but it's just to say that there can be circumstances where it doesn't make sense to opt for a longer fixed rate.