Mortgage Activity analysis for December 2016

The “Instituto Nacional de Estadistica” just released the activity numbers for December 2016. The number of issued mortgages in Spain rose by 6.9% to just under 21000. The average amount per mortgage was of € 113.000.

Analysed on a yearly basis, the number of mortgages increased by 2.8%. Residential mortgages increased by an even stronger growth of 14% to 281.000 for 2016.

Sound practices

If you compare this number with the number of transactions for the last year up to September, this means that there is about one mortgage for every two transactions in Spain and furthermore, the yearly growth of the number of transactions is 11%. So for sure, we can’t talk about aggressive financing practices!

Foreigners active as well

Interesting to note, bought 17% of all properties sold in Spain during the same period. Have a look at our infographic to check where they bought in Spain. Do you want to know why they are buying? Check our analysis of more than 10 reasons here.

Variable interest Rates

68.4% of the new mortgages were created with variable interest rate while only 31.6% with fixed rate. The low Euribor is surely one reason for this, but if you compare to one year ago, the percentage of fixed rate contracts is increasing as some people think that long terms rates have bottomed. The 1 Year Euribor rate remains negative and close to its lowest point ever as of today!

The average mortgage rate is 3.18% for the mortgages issued in December 2016 which is 6% lower than one year ago.

Have a look at other useful information on the financial tables of our website.

Strong positive returns are back

The real estate market in Spain is stronger since the start of 2014 and is back in positive territory. End 2016, the central bank of Spain, “Banco de Espana”, expected the return for residential real estate to be 8.4%. This return is explained nearly equally by rent and capital gains. Read our news we released on that.

To have a complete view on this subject, we advise you to check our news in the next few days and read our mortgage analysis report for the year 2016.

Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Press release

Looking for an expert in Spain? Ask us directly!

Stéphane

Senior analyst and strategist at HTBIS

Check the full HTBIS team here

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