Mortgages lagged behind last year

The largest banks summed up the results of March and the first quarter in the mortgage market. This year, it was not possible to repeat the high result of the previous year, but the banks came close to it. State programs accounted for about half of all disbursements, with family mortgages holding a confident leading position among them.

According to VTB experts, according to the results of the first quarter, the volume of mortgage transactions in Russia amounted to about 1.2 trillion rubles. against 1.3 trillion rubles. for the same period in 2022. March provided a significant part of the issuance, according to VTB – more than 530 billion rubles. “Issuances approached the level of last year, when there was a rush demand on the market due to the extreme growth of rates,” commented Evgeny Dyachkin, Vice President of VTB. According to him, the completion of the so-called near-zero mortgages also played a role in the acceleration of the market. Many borrowers rushed to take advantage of previously approved proposals, so the traditionally poor January-February in terms of results showed sales much higher than usual, he noted.

Market leader Sberbank said that in March it issued housing loans for 335 billion rubles. In total, in the first quarter of 2023, according to Domclick, the bank issued mortgages for 754.5 billion rubles. According to the results of the first quarter of 2023, VTB, the second player in this segment, issued mortgage loans for 228 billion rubles. March turned out to be the most active: the volume of disbursements reached 105.4 billion rubles. In Alfa-Bank, the issuance in the first quarter of the year amounted to 60 billion rubles, they said. In Gazprombank (GPB) – almost 30 billion rubles.

About half of the issuance in January-March of this year was provided by state programs, bankers point out. At the same time, if in 2022 the growth driver among them was “State support for new buildings”, then in this case, the largest players had higher distributions under the “Family” program.

So, in Sberbank, issuance of family mortgages amounted to 151.1 billion rubles. against 136 billion rubles. with state support. In VTB – 66 billion rubles. and 57.7 billion rubles. respectively. “State support acted as a catalyst for the growth in demand: due to the modernization of family mortgages, the number of transactions under it for the first time turned out to be more than under the main preferential program,” said Yevgeny Dyachkin. Alfa-Bank noted that family mortgages showed significant growth in the first quarter and the volume of loans exceeded those under the state support program. The GPB reported that in January-March 2023, the family mortgage program occupies 32.9% of all loans. “The main driver for the growth of family mortgages was the expansion of the program for families with a child under 18,” the bank said.

The trend for family mortgages to outpace state support was outlined in December 2021 (see Kommersant-Online dated January 29, 2022). However, so far not all banks have noted a clear preponderance of this program.

“Most likely, by the end of 2023, family mortgages will also overtake preferential ones,” says Natalia Vashchelyuk, chief analyst at Sovcombank.

The share of loans issued under family mortgages at Sovcombank in the first quarter of 2023 amounted to 15% of all mortgage loans issued, the share of loans issued under preferential mortgage programs (with state support) in the first quarter of 2023 accounted for 16% of all issued mortgage loans. The share of mortgages with state support in the total volume of housing loans issued by Otkritie Bank in the first quarter of 2023 amounted to 34%, and family mortgages increased to 30% of the total volume of loans, Otkritie Bank indicated. The growth of family mortgage lending will be one of the main incentives for the residential construction market this year, Tatyana Chernysheva, head of the mortgage sales department at PSB, is sure.

By periods, the structure of issuing mortgages with state support under various programs can be volatile, and it is unlikely that a stable trend can be observed here, says Yury Belikov, Managing Director for Validation at Expert RA. “In general, taking into account housing prices and debt burden, effective demand will fade, and a new wave of development of the mortgage market should be expected when prices correct and real disposable incomes of the population begin to show a steadily positive trend,” he concludes.

Ksenia Dementieva, Yulia Poslavskaya