The volume of loans banks granted to people looking to buy a home rose by the equivalent of EUR37 million in February and reached EUR7.72 billion, according to the data of Romania’s central bank.
Bankers started off on the wrong foot this year so that the volume of loans fell by some EUR65 million in January. It had gone up by EUR150 million in December.
Demand for “First Home” loans, which had kept the mortgage lending going during the crisis, has visibly slowed down in recent months and sales of standard loans were restricted by the new rules introduced by the central bank for retail foreign currency loans.
“There are certain cycles on the loan market and the months when the number of applications is high do not overlap with the months when those loans are actually granted,” says Liviu Andrei, chief executive of loan broker Alliance Finance. “In a mortgage loan’s case it may take 20 to 60 days from the submission of the application to the actual disbursement, so that the contracts for the applications submitted in December and January should have been signed in February.”
The slowdown of mortgage loan sales at the beginning of the year also shows in the statistics of the Credit Bureau, which indicated an increase by merely 2,000 accounts of the number of mortgage loans in the first two months of the year.
The volume of mortgage loans went up about EUR1 billion last year, driven by the government-secured loans. Demand for such loans has been dwindling in recent months, and the number of applications approved by the Guarantee Fund every day reached 85 in March from over 100 at the end of last year.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)