Home loan production last year is expected to fall by 3% compared to 2021 but “remains high” compared to the average of the last ten years, the Banque de France announced on Thursday.
Excluding loan renegotiations, the production of new loans for the year 2022 “would amount to 218.4 billion euros”, according to the latest data from the central bank at the end of November but which include a projection for the last month of the year .
It is “an all-time high apart from the exceptional production of the year 2021”, the year of recovery after a year 2020 distorted by Covid-19, indicates the monthly monitoring document on the subject.
“Credit supply has remained plentiful and cheaper than with our main European partners,” Marie-Laure Barut-Etherington, deputy director general of the Bank of France’s statistics, studies and international department, said at a press conference.
However, it detects a “landing phase in the second half of the year”, less likely to generate new files.
A discovery shared by the Century 21 agency group, which on Tuesday reported a “real slowdown during the summer”. Overall, real estate activity decreased by 4.1% during the year, according to the agency network.
The central bank also expects an average lending rate (excluding insurance and ancillary charges) at 2.04% in December, higher than 2% for the first time since April 2016.
This barrier had already been overcome in October according to the dashboard of the Crédit Logement/Csa observatory, which however does not provide such complete data as the Banque de France.
The average rate was almost double that of the previous year, just over 1%. This increase, linked to that of the key rates of the European Central Bank (ECB), is therefore very rapid.
The bill for the borrower increases accordingly. For example, when the rate on a loan of 150,000 euros in 20 years goes from 1% to 2%, the amount to be repaid in fines goes from around 165,500 euros to more than 182,000 euros, i.e. around 16,500 euros more.
Marie-Laure Barut-Etherington has again ruled out any freeze on the housing market due to the usury rate, a maximum rate intended to protect borrowers from abusive credit conditions.
This legal maximum, raised on January 1 to 3.57% all costs included for a loan of 20 years or more, is under fire from critics, particularly from brokers who see it as a barrier to accessing mortgages.
Several professional associations also called on Wednesday to “unblock access to credit” in an open letter addressed to Deputy Housing Minister Olivier Klein.
The number of compromises canceled due to refusal of credit is “much less important than some market operators have been able to declare, whose alarmist communication has undoubtedly contributed to slowing down real estate projects even more than the tightening of financing conditions observed on Tuesday president of the century 21 Charles Marinakis.
More prosaically, a higher rate allows intermediaries to better defend their commissions, the adjustment variable of the banks when the gap between the nominal rate and the usury rate narrows.