84
84

INE: Mortgage Lending Rose by 16.5% YoY to €42.7bn in 2018

27 February 2019 – La Vanguardia

Last year, 345,186 mortgages to purchase homes were signed in Spain, up by 10.3% compared to 2017, but the banks again refrained from fully opening the financing tap: the average loan amount increased by just 5.6% to €123,727, according to data presented on Wednesday by Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE).

The growth in the average amount is only slightly higher than the increase in house prices (which rose by 3.9% on average last year, according to data from the Ministry of Development, albeit by much more in the large cities and their metropolitan areas, where the bulk of demand is concentrated). “The banks are adopting a conservative strategy, that’s for sure”, said Oscar Gorgues, Manager of the Chamber of Urban Property in Barcelona – “because they are still very mindful of the excesses of the boom years. For that reason too, we can say that the real estate market is healthy and there is no risk of a bubble”.

The data from INE shows that after five years of recovery in the real estate sector, the number of mortgages granted is still 71% lower than the 1.24 million mortgages granted by the banks in 2007, the last year before the burst of the real estate bubble.

According to real estate firms, the caution on the part of the banks means that the main factor causing families, and especially young people, to rent, is the fact that it is impossible for them to obtain a mortgage loan. By contrast, according to the real estate firm Forcadell, around one third of homes are now purchased without a mortgage, in operations undertaken by investors (…).

According to data from INE, the value of all of the new mortgages constituted to purchase homes last year amounted to €42.7 billion, up by 16.5% compared to 2017, due to the combined effect of increases in the number of operations and the average loan amount (…).

Original story: La Vanguardia (by Rosa Salvador)

Translation: Carmel Drake