At the company of mortgages its contraction deepens month by month. The rise in rates and the tightening of conditions by banks is having a dent in the granting of housing credit and is behind the 18.8% drop that occurred last July, coinciding with the first year of the monetary tightening by the European Central Bank (ECB).
In the seventh month of the year, a total of 29,223 new contracts were signed for the acquisition of a property, according to data published this Wednesday by the Statistics National Institute (INE). On the contrary, the average interest rate applied to loans continues its climb and then stood at 3.24%1.32 points above the previous year and the highest figure since August 2016
Besides, the fixed rate continues to lose ground in favor of the variable rate, which is rising driven by mixed mortgages that are also counted as such. Thus, 57.8% of housing mortgages established in July were referenced to a fixed rate, increasingly further from the 75% that was reached in April 2022; On the other hand, 42.2% were signed at a variable rate.
By community, the autonomous communities with the highest number of mortgages established on homes in July were Andalusia (5,932), Catalonia (5,279) and Community of Madrid (4,404).
The regions with the highest annual variation rates in the number of mortgages on homes were Aragón (6.5%), the Balearic Islands (4.5%) and Extremadura (1.2%), while Cantabria (-31.1%) , Galicia (-30.2%) and Catalonia (-25.8%) presented the largest decreases in their annual rates.