Freeze on mortgage rates

Eurobank, Piraeus and Alpha Bank have announced that they will be keeping mortgage installments at their current levels for 12 months. As pledged by the first two banks, the baseline rates of serviced mortgage loans will remain at the levels they were on March 31, 2023, minus 20 basis points, for 12 months, starting in May. National Bank is expected to follow suit.

Meanwhile, the government is also pushing for the participation of servicers in the program too, aiming to set a ceiling on the interest rate increases for housing loans, seeking the cooperation of bad-loan management companies.

The measure was discussed on Tuesday at the meeting of the Association of Loan and Credit Management Companies (EEDADP), whose members, according to information, supported the extension of the measure to the mortgage portfolios that the servicers manage on behalf of the funds that have bought the securitized loans. These are mortgage loans amounting to 21.4 billion euros, which have come into the ownership of the funds through successive securitizations and sales in recent years.

They include loans under the Katseli law, which are part of the securitized portfolios, the majority of which have been regulated based on court decisions, but also loans outside the Katseli law, which were already in the red and were transferred. Those loans, to the extent that they were already problematic ones, are serviced with difficulty by the debtors, and the increase in interest rates has significantly worsened the latter’s financial position. The inclusion of those mortgages in the capping program will put a ceiling on further rate increases based on a freeze that will be decided with a reference date of March 31 and for a period of up to 12 months.

According to data from the banks, the program is projected to cover around 400,000 housing loans, a figure that is expected to increase geometrically if the loans that have been sold to funds are eventually included in the rate capping program.