2024-03-12 03:33:13
Spanish banks make moves on the mortgage board. After a 2023 marked by a dizzying rise in financing costs, in line with the increases decreed by the European Central Bank (ECB), The trend at the start of the year is going in the opposite direction. The lowering of the interest on new loans for housing, also driven by the moderation of the Euribor, has become the dominant trend within the sector in this first quarter, a movement especially supported by entities with a business that is highly dependent on the Spanish market. , among which are CaixaBank, Bankinter or Banco Sabadell.
The mortgage war is ignited again with the fixed rate as the main battlefield in a scenario marked by the slowdown in the contracting of mortgages and the inclination towards the contracting of mixed loans, which fell to its lowest levels since the pandemic last year with the formalization of 381,560 credits. To this the limping evolution of the Euribor joins and the expectation that interest rates will begin to fall throughout 2024. In this context, banks have begun to adjust positions with improvements in offers to buy a house. Up to a total of fourteen entities have opted for this turn in so far this year.
Bankinter was the first to take a step forward in this strategy last month of January, reducing from 3.6% to 3.3% the interest established for your fixed mortgages in all terms, as well as in the product ‘efficient home mortgage’, which falls in the same proportion. This has been followed Unicaja among large entities, which has even updated several of its products downwards twice. The 30-year fixed mortgage stands out for payrolls over 2,500 euros and whose cost goes from 3.9% to 3.25%, while the one focused on payrolls lower than this amount goes from a rate of 4.25% to 3.65% after the two changes made.
In this line, Sabadell Bank has decided to go further and has opted to place the price of its subsidized fixed-rate mortgage below 3%. Specifically, it has applied a reduction from 3.4% to 2.8%. bank has been going in the same direction recently with his ‘Mari Carmen fixed rate mortgage’ and places them at 2.9%, as well as Ibercaja, which promotes the ‘Let’s Go Fixed Mortgage’ al 2,99%. CaixaBankfor its part, one of the leaders in the mortgage market by quota volume, has implemented a reduction of 25 basis points in ‘Casa Fácil fixed’ in its different terms, according to the data collected by Kelisto.
“The sales have reached everything the market, but with special intensity in the fixed and mixed modality, something that makes complete sense if the banks want to start a commercial offensive, since they are the most contracted,” they tell La Información from the aforementioned price comparator. A struggle to which they have also joined Cajamar, imaginBank, Evo Banco, Coinc, MyInvestor or Caja Ingenieroswith price improvements ranging from 0.5% to 0.1%. INGfor example, has moderated interest by half a percentage point of its ‘Orange Mortgage’ in two sections and reaches March at 3.5%.
From Kelisto They specify that this behavior accelerated during February, the first “really” operational month after Christmas. “With somewhat clearer expectations (about the ECB’s actions), there is a bit more calm in March,” they explain while anticipating that the downward pace could intensify as June approaches, when it is scheduled that Christine Lagarde announce the first rate contraction.
At the bank leans toward this trend at a time when families They flee from interest rates. The slowdown in demand has been accompanied by a rise in early repayments, factors that have pushed the outstanding mortgage balance to minimums of February 2006 after accounting for 494,793 million in January, according to data from the Bank of Spain. This translates into a reduction of 15.7 billion in twelve months. Preventing this amount from being reduced further will be one of the main challenges for the banking this 2024 if you want to maintain growth double-digit interest margin.
In fact, analysts predict that the banks most focused on the national business will be the ones that will notice the effects of this mortgage struggle the most, as the ‘war’ intensifies, being very close to reaching their interest margin ceiling. However, they predict that this will not happen until the second half of 2024, since in this first party will still benefit from the revaluation of the assets. “Fee income is likely to be an increasingly important revenue driver as interest spending slows,” Bloomberg Intelligence notes.
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