mixed rate mortgage became the queen mortgage market against fixed mortgage and in excess of variable. This is indicated by the data collected by mortgage comparator iSavings in his latest analysis of the Spanish mortgage market during first quarter of 2023. This trend, which has already begun to be sensed at the end of 2022, consolidated especially in February and March of this year.
“The mixed mortgage rose from the ashes in the second half of 2022, but a few months ago many users became interested in this product, for firms we started to notice a real change in trend in November of last year,” explains Marcel Beyer, CEO of iAhorro. especially, According to the iAhorro Index released this Thursday in January 2023, 40.30% of mortgage loans signed by users who went to the mortgage comparison tool were managed at a mixed interest rate.this figure rose to 64.22% in February and softened slightly to 53.92% in March.
Similarly, the iAhorro Index was the first to collect data on mixed mortgages signed in Spain because no government agency, not even the National Institute of Statistics (INE), records them that way, but instead considers them fixed since the first term of it. The loan type is managed with a fixed interest rate. Thus, according to the INE, in January 2023 (the last month in which the official agency published the figures), 67.40% of the mortgage loans signed in Spain were managed with a fixed interest rate and the remaining 32.60% with a variable interest rate.
There is an increasing supply and demand for mixed rate mortgages
Reasons for the rise in demand for mixed mortgages include: more and more banks are betting that they will include this product in their offerings, the rise in fixed mortgage interest rates, and the greater the collateral they provide over the fixed term. more than variable mortgages provide.
So much so that Laboral Kutxa has joined TargoBank and CaixaBank, Openbank and ING, Banco Santander, Bankinter, Ibercaja, EVO and Hipotecas.com and are already offering hybrid mortgages to their clients. “Those who do not market mixed mortgages started marketing in order to compete in the market,” said Beyer, “We signed 1 fixed initial term mixed mortgage agreements at iAhorro in March of this year. When we add Euribor, which we remember to be 3,647% in March, to the difference. well below what we can currently find in the constant or variable.
And although iAhorro has not collected data on hybrid mortgage types so far as it represents a very low percentage of registered firms, they have included data for the first quarter of 2023 with the increase in supply and demand: Average mixed rates signed by mortgage comparator users in January were 1.97% in the constant tranche.usually covers the first five to ten years of the mortgage loan; In February, this tax increased slightly to 2.17%, and in March it was 2.25%. Despite this, it is still almost half a point below that recorded in 100% fixed housing loans.
Fixed rate mortgage already at 3% TIN… or higher
So far in 2023, flat rate mortgages have become more expensive compared to offerings last year. However, as the CEO of iAhorro put it, “we are now starting to see more stability. Banks continue to adjust their offerings, but they do it little by little, not as abruptly as in 2022”.
Thus, between January and March 2023, the average that users going to iAhorro signed their fixed mortgages was 2.65%, which is 0.6 percentage points higher than recorded in October-December 2023. 2022 (2.05%). When we look at the monthly average, we see that it increased to 2.43% in January, to 2.76% in February, and stabilized at 2.74% in March. If we compare these data with the data recorded by the INE in January 2023, we see that the average recorded by the official agency that month is even higher: 2.79%.
“At iAhorro, we get better interest rates on our users’ mortgages than banks offer to customers who go directly to them,” says the general manager of the mortgage benchmark tool. However, unlike the mixed mortgage, the fixed mortgage has been losing followers in recent months: it had more than 80% of the market share in the third quarter of 2022, but only became available at 30.39%. Mortgages signed by the comparator in March 2023, based on data from the iAhorro Index.
What happened to the variable mortgage?
While it is true that Euribor continues to grow, not as severely as in 2022, their floating rate (differential + Euribor) mortgages have remained in terms of market share references and they continue to account for 10 to 15% of loans signed by iAhorro users. : They represented 10.45% of signatures in January 2023, 13.64% in February and slightly higher to 15.69% in March.
What will happen next? The CEO of iAhorro assures that “everything will depend on the policy followed by the company”. European Central Bank (ECB), Whether the official interest rates, currently 3.5%, will continue to rise after two increases of +0.5% in February and March, resulting in a rise in fixed, floating or Mortgage prices.