By Andrea Hargraves 
The home loan crunch won’t end in the fall, but it will make it easier to apply for a home loan.
The European Central Bank continues to raise interest rates, which leads to an increase in Euribor rates, and therefore mortgage loan payments. Here, we already know that only in 2024 can we expect the beginning of a decline in interest rates.
But the Bank of Portugal wants to implement a measure to make new loans more flexible and give the Portuguese the opportunity to be able to buy a house in the midst of this housing crisis.
The idea is to make mandatory testing less demanding for those applying for housing or consumer credit.
But nothing will happen in the next month and a half, only in the fall.
This is because, although it is already possible to send contributions, in an editable format and with a deadline of September 21, the procedure only takes effect in the last quarter of the year.
Let’s go over the examples, so you can better understand what’s on the table.
What happens in this test is a simulation of interest rates, to see if owners are able to pay the premiums. Currently, the requirement is a 3 percentage point difference in contracts longer than 10 years.
With this new project, the interest rate will be 1.5 percentage points, ie half.
This means that if we take into account the 12-month Euribor, which is over 4%, and add the applicable change requirements, we arrive at the index of over 7%.
But with the new rules of the Bank of Portugal, we only increased 1.5 percentage points and ended up with more than 5.5%.
In the shorter term, the shock families will undergo in the credit-granting test will also be halved.
After this amount, the average effort of the family is calculated, which cannot exceed 50%, meaning that the cost of the loan cannot exceed half of the amount that enters the family.
Banco de Portugal says nobody loses with the new procedure. Because it is beneficial to the consumer and has no cost to the credit-granting entities.