Mortgage activity last January rose by 2.9 percent from the same month in 2022, with 37,435 new credits issued. This marks the strongest January on record since 2020, when more than 40,200 mortgages were signed, according to data released this week by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
With the year-over-year increase, residential mortgage lending returned to a positive trend after a December 2022 dip, which had shown an 8.8 percent annual decline following 21 straight months of growth.
The average amount borrowed for residences grew by 1.3 percent compared to the previous year. In January, the average loan value reached 142,654 euros, while total lending reached 5,340.2 million euros, up 4.3 percent from the year before.
For January, the overall average interest rate on all home loans stood at 2.86 percent, and the typical loan term stretched to 24 years.
When focusing on residences specifically, the average rate was 2.65 percent, higher than the 1.85 percent registered a year earlier, with an average maturity of 25 years.
In January, 32.6 percent of new residential mortgages carried a variable rate, while 67.4 percent were agreed at a fixed rate. The initial average rate stood at 2.38 percent for variable-rate residential loans and 2.79 percent for fixed-rate loans.
INE noted an ongoing revision of statistical series related to interest rates since January 2020, following the adoption of a new method to verify results for the initial average rate on newly created mortgages.
Specifically, the updates implemented during the review adjusted filters to accommodate atypical values, which in turn improved the accuracy of the estimated average rates. The agency stated that the revised series now more accurately reflects the level of interest rates and their evolution over time.
Source attribution: INE data on January mortgage activity and interest rate revisions are cited to illustrate monthly trends and methodological improvements in the statistical series.