The Spanish bank ‘marks territory’ in the mortgage market and steps on the accelerator with the update of its commercial offer. The change in trend observed in home buying and selling, which is beginning to show early symptoms of recovery, has flooded the sector with optimism. Last February (the latest data available) it recorded what was its first increase in twelve months, with a rebound of 5.8%, confirming the turning point observed months ago. Its upward trend has gone hand in hand with the mortgage firm, which has also broken its streak of declines after rising 3.8% during the second month of the year. Faced with these ‘green shoots’, entities have refined their strategy, focused on making loans cheaper.
This ‘war’, which began to take shape at the start of 2024, moves into a new phase thanks to the banking heavyweights, who have fueled the battle during April. Except for Banco Santander, which after an incipient movement at the end of last year, has distanced itself from the race for now, the big five in the sector take the lead and are the protagonists of the changes carried out during the fourth month of the year in the field of fixed. The last to tighten the board has been Bankinter, which has cut its mortgage by more than three tenths, which goes from 3.3% to 2.99%. It replicates the steps of last January, when interest also fell in the same proportion.
It does so just after the offensive launched by its main competitors, focused on reducing the price of fixed-rate loans below 3%. Since the 0.1% reduction carried out by BBVA on its ‘fixed rate mortgage’, whose cost is currently 2.9%, to Banco Sabadell, which has lowered the interest on three occasions in recent weeks, placing it at 2.6%, the downward trend is accentuated. The most aggressive in this sense has been CaixaBank with a 0.4% reduction in ‘fixed easy home’ and places the interest in a range that goes from 2.9% to 2.7%, depending on the life of the loan.
Unicaja, on the other hand, maintains them above 3.6% despite the two adjustments applied, as does ING, another of the entities that have added, although with timid improvements in this regard. On the contrary, there have been hardly any changes in the variables, subject to the Euribor, as well as in the mixed ones, in which the new promotions are also less aggressive with respect to those previously stipulated. “The reductions in mortgages continue – especially in fixed-rate ones – and are regaining a certain rhythm, after March was a somewhat calmer month,” says Kelisto.es spokesperson, Estefanía González.
From the price comparator they specify that these maneuvers “confirm the idea that the arrival of the mortgage war is not as abrupt as it seemed at the beginning, at least in the banks’ standard offers”, but rather that they are gradual declines. . . Along the same lines, Luis Javaloyes, CEO of Agencia Negociadora, explains that entities are competing “intensely” to attract new clients. The reactivation of the contracting of housing loans is crucial for banks before they exhaust the growth of the interest margin through the repricing of already existing mortgage portfolios.
This situation forces them to closely monitor the path of the Euribor, as well as the messages from the European Central Bank (ECB). The vice president of the organization and former Minister of Economy of Spain, Luis de Guindos, advanced this Tuesday that the drop in interest rates next June is a “fait accompli,” as long as there are no surprises. The uncertainty lies in the magnitude and continuity over time of the cuts. With these doubts as a starting point, banks have chosen to position themselves with improvements in conditions. As a consequence, the average rate of new production has begun to moderate, as shown by the February data, in which the average rate stood at 3.33%, compared to 3.46% in January, conditioned by the fixed rate, which It closed at 3.57%.
The bank is confident that the demand for credit will increase in the coming months after the turnaround experienced in the first stages of the year, in which it has registered double-digit growth, up to 9,162 million. This represents an increase of more than 1,000 million compared to the amount of January and February 2023. The main risk for these encouraging prospects that will allow the new direction to be consolidated lies in the shortage of housing supply which, according to real estate portals, could ral encourage the recovery of the mortgage market.
