China News Service, Beijing, July 3 (Reporter Pang Wuji) Since the second quarter of this year, mortgage interest rates in most cities in China have continued to rise. According to data from the Shell Research Institute, in June, the 72 cities monitored by the Shell Research Institute had an interest rate of 5.52% for the mainstream first home mortgage, and the second set of interest rates were 5.77%, which were 5 and 4 basis points higher than that in May; The level of housing interest rates is not far from the November 2019 high.
At the same time as interest rates are increasing, many banks also appear to line up for second-hand mortgage business and extend the loan cycle. According to statistics from the Shell Research Institute, the average loan period in 72 key cities was extended to 50 days in June.
This is not consistent with the fact that the overall market has ample liquidity and interest rates are at a relatively low level. As of June, China’s loan market quoted interest rate (LPR) has not been adjusted for 14 consecutive months. The market for housing loans and other types of loans is “segregated.”
Mortgage interest rates are rising, and the shortage of quotas is not a national phenomenon. The Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and other areas with high housing market enthusiasm in the early stage showed obvious performance, while the housing loans in areas with low or relatively stable housing market such as Beijing were relatively stable. According to statistics from the Shell Research Institute, in June, the interest rates for the first and second home loans in Suzhou were raised by 65 and 50 basis points respectively from the previous month. The rate of increase ranked first among all the 72 cities monitored. In addition, the first and second home loan interest rates in Shaoxing and Hangzhou increased by 30 basis points.
The extension of the lending cycle and the increase in interest rates will affect the pace of transactions, especially for “sell one buy one” house swap transactions. Some intermediary agencies in Shanghai have revealed that the number of second-hand housing bills has been greatly reduced. In June, the transaction volume of second-hand housing in Shell 50 City fell by about 20% month-on-month.
As for the reasons for the shortage of housing loans in the middle of the year, many industry insiders analyzed that this is the initiative of financial institutions under the real estate loan concentration management system implemented this year. result.
Li Yujia, chief researcher of the Guangdong Housing Policy Research Center, pointed out that whenever the property market is tightened, there will be a “mortgage shortage”. This situation is particularly obvious this year, mainly because under the real estate loan concentration management system, financial institutions need to control the amount of new real estate loans to avoid “stepping on” the regulatory red line. Therefore, banks have also consciously slowed down the pace of mortgage lending.
Shell Research Institute also believes that due to the use of a relatively large amount of credit resources in the first quarter, some banks took the initiative to adjust the speed of credit provision in the second quarter.There is a shortage of quotas in the city. Cities such as Hefei, Hangzhou, and Chengdu provided more credit lines in the first half of the year. Recently, some banks have gradually reduced or suspended personal mortgage loans.
Industry experts predict that this situation will not last long. Shell Research Institute pointed out that in 2020, China’s residential sector will add about 6 trillion yuan (RMB, the same below) of new medium and long-term loans. If the scale of credit is considered to match the nominal economic growth rate, it is expected that this year’s new medium and long-term loans will be approximately A quota of 6.4 trillion yuan-6.5 trillion yuan. Excluding the used quota of about 3 trillion yuan in the first half of the year, the available quota in the second half of the year still exceeds about 3 trillion yuan. Therefore, in the second half of the year, bank credit lines and lending cycles may gradually return to normal.
The tight housing loan in some cities is not the only manifestation of the “lack of money” in the property market. According to a number of media reports, the central bank has recently included the “three red lines” (new financial management regulations for key real estate companies) pilot real estate business ticket data into its monitoring scope. In the past, commercial bills, a relatively “grey” financing chain, surfaced, and the supply chain financing closely related to it has also been strictly controlled. Prior to this, the Fund Industry Association stopped the registration of real estate supply chain products by fund subsidiaries.
In addition, since the beginning of this year, one of the important sources of financing for real estate companies, the scale of real estate trusts has also continued to drop, and the financing environment for real estate companies has been significantly tightened. According to incomplete statistics from the Kerui Research Center, the financing amount of 100 typical real estate companies in the first half of 2021 was 609 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 34% and a month-on-month decrease of 29%, the lowest level since 2018.
In fact, whether it is the demand-side “mortgage shortage” or the supply-side developer financing “tightening curse”, they all reflect the same policy direction: speculation, violations and excesses Funds are squeezed out of the real estate sector. The big logic behind it is “housing, not speculation”.
For a long time, the real estate industry has played a huge currency reservoir. Various sources of funds continue to pour into the property market, promoting the formation of the real estate “golden 20 years”. However, problems also follow: high housing prices have a crowding-out effect on industries and consumption; excessive inflow of credit resources, including operating loans, into real estate, which squeezes out credit resources that support the real economy, hindering development and innovation. This “imbalance” needs to be corrected. This is also the important reason why the decision-makers emphasized “promoting the balanced development of finance, real estate and the real economy”.
For the real estate industry, Li Yujia pointed out that the era of massive influx of capital into the property market is over, and the era of leveraging the property market is gone forever.
(The original title: China’s multi-city mortgage interest rates are rising, experts: “The era of leveraged property speculation” is gone forever)