Increase the repayment time, refinance the credits, change from a variable rate to a fixed rate… The scant impact of the Code of Good Practices extended by the Government and the banks at the beginning of the year has led the main entities of the country to deploy a range of alternatives to offer to a part of its clients with mortgages that are beginning to have problems to face the increase in installments due to the escalation of the Euribor.
Until the month of May, the banks had barely received 33,000 requests to adhere to said Code, as recognized by the Vice President of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, after her last meeting with the employers of the sector a couple of weeks ago. Many of these requests – the majority, in fact – have been rejected by the entities because they did not meet the established requirements; In other cases in which they have passed the filter of the banks, the mortgaged themselves have ended up refusing to take advantage of the aid due to the demands and the consequences that they entail in the long run.
The result is a number of people who have taken advantage of the measures that remains well below the million people that the Government expected to cover with the extension of the Code. However, the difficulties are still there for many mortgage holders and in this situation, banks are opting to offer individual and personalized solutions, adapted to the profile of their clients with the greatest difficulties in assuming the committed payments.
The alternatives include extending the repayment period of the loans (with the consequent effect on interest that this entails), facilitating changes from variable-rate to fixed-rate mortgages, renegotiating the agreed conditions or favoring refinancing – which in recent months has grown remarkably – and only in the most extreme cases is dation-in-payment chosen, but “right now they are an exception, nothing to do with the bursting of the bubble 15 years ago,” say the sources consulted by this newspaper.
“We are not at all in a situation like that of 2008. There is a lot of payment capacity and so far we are not detecting alarming levels of defaults. In addition, at the first signs of difficulties, the bank already contacts the client and tries to find a solution with him, “they add.