The mortgage firm regained its tone in February and grew by 13.8%

The number of mortgages for the purchase of homes signed in Spain last February increased by 13.8% with respect to the same period of the previous year. In that month, 27,945 mortgages were constituted for an average amount of 119,708 euros, that is, for an amount 3.1% higher than a year ago, according to data published today by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). With this year-on-year rebound, the mortgage firm is chaining two consecutive months of promotions, after having rebounded by 9.2% in January (it must be remembered that it stagnated in December and fell 3.7% in November). And although with respect to the month of January the contracting decreased by 6.2%, in the accumulated of the year it increased by 11.4%.

The data of the INE reinforce the conclusions of the survey conducted by the Bank of Spain to the entities on bank loans in the first quarter of 2018, which ensured that the conditions to access a mortgage have been relaxed and are more favorable than before for the families

So much so that the average interest rate at the beginning of the loan was 2.66%, 15.3% lower than February 2017, and the average term of 24 years. The cheapening reached both the variable rate mortgages, whose average interest rate at the beginning was 2.47%, with a significant decrease of 20.4%; as for the fixed type, with a rate of 3.05%, 4.7% lower.

Although it seems that the new hypotheses have reverted to the variable rate, which represented 62.4% of the total loans for the purchase of houses, the fixed rate grew by 8.2% in the annual rate (its weight was 37.6%), according to the INE.

The total borrowed capital increased by 17.4% year-on-year to reach 3,345 million euros. This helped the mortgage firm increase in February in all the autonomous communities, except in Extremadura, Castilla y León and Aragón. And that in many the growth was of two digits. The communities with the highest annual variation rates were País Vasco (26.2%), Baleares (26.1%) and Andalucía (19%). In Madrid, the year-on-year growth was 17%, ahead of that registered in Catalonia (11.3%). They repeated the regions with the largest number of mortgages constituted on housing: Comunidad de Madrid (5,365), Andalucía (5,223) and Cataluña (4,357).

Source: El Pais