January Sees a 10.6% Rise in Mortgages Granted

This year has got off to an excellent start with regards to property sales, new construction and the granting of new mortgages.

The number of new mortgages granted in January this year reached 23,275 operations, which is an increase on last year of 10.6%, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) and the College of Registry Offices.

This means that with January’s figures, the number of new mortgages being awarded has gone up for 20 consecutive months, and is the second highest number of mortgages granted in one month since February 2013.

Last year, was the first complete year in a while where the number of mortgages granted each month was higher than for the same month of 2014. And it looks like the trend will continue throughout 2016.

Last December closed with an annual increase of 21.1%.

Despite the fact that the 10.6% rise in January in the number of mortgages being granted to new homeowners is much more moderate than during the last month of 2015, the fact that a figure of 23,275 mortgages was reached is very significant, as it makes it the second best figure in terms of number of transactions since February 2013, when 24,197 new mortgages were awarded.

Apart from then, the first month of this year has only been exceeded by September 2015 when the banks lent money for 23,828 operations.

The average amount of money handed out by Spain’s banks for a new mortgage was approximately 105,680 euro, which is 0.2% more than in January 2015, yet 2% less than for the previous month, December.

And, with regards to interest rates, these new mortgages on average began with an interest rate of 3.27%, which is actually 0.4% lower than the figure registered twelve months ago.

The number of mortgages granted in the various autonomous regions in Spain increased the most annually in the following regions:

• Castilla-La Mancha: +30.4%
• Madrid: +22.9%
• Andalucía: +22.2%

As a matter of fact, Madrid and Andalucía were the two regions that granted the greatest number of mortgages in January this year along with Cataluña, with figures of 4,684, 3,976 and 3,857 respectively.

And, at the other end of the scale, the regions where the number of people taking out a mortgage was lower than between January 2015 and January 2016 included:

• Canary Islands: -27.3%
• Galicia: -10.1%
• Aragón: -8.7%
• La Rioja: -6.6%
• Murcia: -4.1%

Source: www.idealista.com