The Covid year closed with an annual drop of more than 7.5% in the number of mortgages signed to pay for a home, breaking with a trend that began in 2013 and ended with six consecutive years of increases. However, taking into account the data updated yesterday by the Spanish Mortgage Association (AHE), the average loan amounts, which grew at the same time as the number of operations in recent years, recorded a new rise, keeping alive a trend towards growth. rise that in relation to prices already adds 11 years in a row. The summary that the AHE throws up, therefore, is that in 2020 fewer mortgages were contracted for housing -a total of 333,721-, but that these were more expensive -134,904 euros on average-.
Housing is, in fact, the only one of the segments analyzed by the AEH that manages to keep the average loan amounts up. According to the data, the amounts of rustic properties fell by 1.3%, urban plots fell almost 13% and the category of other urban properties did almost 8%. Only housing, with a 7.4% rise in prices, withstood the blow of the pandemic.
With regard to the number of registered transactions, as with houses, all segments in 2020 plummet between -5.3% of other urban properties and -19.5% of rustic properties.
Behind these data there are different causes beyond the stoppage of activity for several weeks last year, at the worst time of the pandemic. On the one hand, there are all the operations that, as a result of the economic crisis, were temporarily fallow or collapsed due to the poor prospects for the recovery or the evolution of employment. On the other, the growing interest in single-family homes, generally with higher prices than flats, has also been able to shift the advance of average loan amounts towards positive rates.
In total, according to the data compiled in the bulletin for the fourth quarter of the year, in 2020 a total of 460,605 mortgages were registered between homes and other properties, which represents a 7.5% decrease compared to 2019 and a joint amount of 69,222 million euros, 6.1% less than in 2019.
The AHE points out that in the balance of the year the effects derived from the preventive measures implemented to stop the pandemic “clearly” have had an impact on the change in sign shown by the evolution of mortgage activity.
For this reason, as happened in the previous year with the approval of the Law regulating real estate credit contracts 5/2019, the inflection point in the evolution of mortgage balances experienced with the pandemic may “be merely temporary in nature. as long as the situation is overcome ”. In fact, in the fourth quarter, the levels of mortgage activity presented a positive result in quarterly terms, despite not finishing consolidating the recovery in year-on-year terms. In fact, between October and December, slightly more than 112,300 operations were registered, representing a quarter-on-quarter increase of almost 10%.
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